#misunderstood villains

[bethanydelleman]

A Full Defense of Lydia Bennet

Lydia Bennet is not a villain, but she gets a lot of hate for carelessly running off with Wickham and possibly ruining her sister’s lives. The narrator and characters, however, do not blame Lydia very much and I don’t think the author meant for us to hate her. She was failed by her parents, who did not teach her how to properly behave and did not ensure she was properly protected.

Obviously, the real villain is Wickham.

The most vicious takedown of Lydia is put in the mouth (letter) of a character we should not respect, Mr. Collins. We already know that his morality is skewed, as he seems to view the collection of tithes and sucking up to Lady Catherine as his primary duties, he writes this of Lydia, “I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age.” (Ch 48). However, even he mentions the real cause, “a faulty degree of indulgence”.

Elizabeth feels this cause strongly, and lays out a good argument for her father on why Lydia should not go to Brighton, “She represented to him all the improprieties of Lydia’s general behaviour, the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of such a woman as Mrs. Forster, and the probability of her being yet more imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the temptations must be greater than at home.” (Ch 41). Mr. Bennet dismisses all these great arguments because he is too lazy to deal with Lydia’s disappointment. He’s been a lazy parent and continues to be.

Mr. Bennet then takes on the responsibility for what happened, “���Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it… No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame.” (Ch 50). Lydia has been allowed to run around flirting with officers for months, without any check on her conduct. She does not act within the rules of society, and while Elizabeth and Jane have tried to correct her, Lydia knew they had no real authority. She needed parents and neither of them did their duty. 

Mr. Bennet also acknowledges that he failed his daughters by not saving money for their future provision, “Had he done his duty in that respect” (Ch 50).

Mrs. Bennet shares this guilt, little as she will accept it: Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few minutes’ conversation together, received them exactly as might be expected; with tears and lamentations of regret, invectives against the villainous conduct of Wickham, and complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage; blaming everybody but the person to whose ill-judging indulgence the errors of her daughter must principally be owing. (Ch 47)

Lastly, Lydia was failed by Darcy, who talks about his share of the blame here: “Wickham’s worthlessness had not been so well known as to make it impossible for any young woman of character to love or confide in him. He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him to lay his private actions open to the world.” (Ch 52). We see in Sense & Sensibility Elinor asking everyone who knows him about Willoughby’s character. Character references were important, that is how women knew they were safe in a man’s presence. Darcy knew the truth and he left Meryton and the Bennets in danger.

Lydia did make a choice (and certainly the wrong one), but she does not deserve all the blame for what happened. The narrator makes it clear that no one should be surprised by the outcome. Lydia was not taught was what right, she was not taught to control her impulses, and she was put out in the world too young, as Colonel Brandon said in Sense & Sensibility, “But can we wonder that… without a friend to advise or restrain her… she should fall?”

Related posts: Lydia too young to be out, Should Darcy have warned Meryton?

[sunderwight]

I love how the general consensus in Scum Villain ABO fics is that whatever Shen Jiu's secondary gender was, he was lying about it.

Omega? Obviously he's going to cover that up. Potential weakness! Probably related to past traumatic experiences! No one can know! He's going to pretend to be either a Beta or an Alpha instead.

Alpha? Hates it and everyone else and has no interest in playing the type. Hides it less because of how other people might respond and more because he's having some kind of complicated dysphoria about it.

Beta? I've never see it but I bet he'd disguise that as well. He's totally an Alpha, don't ask questions, fuck off and don't violate the mile-wide personal space bubble.

Whatever Shen Jiu is, we all know he'd be wildly uncomfortable with it.

[each-uisge-enthusiast]

the modern villainisation of demeter will never cease to enrage me bc it wasn’t ENOUGH to just take a story of a girl being torn from her home from everyone who loved her and dragged away to be forced into marriage and twist and corrupt it until it was a romance story about female empowerment that wasn’t ENOUGH they HAD to take the original hero of the story the mother who went to every length to find her daughter again to bring her home and demonise her character until she was this horrific overbearing unloving mother. overprotective controlling without love. they turn the story of her grief at her YOUNG daughter being torn from her without her knowledge into the story of a misunderstood bad boy and a horrible cruel mother who won’t give him a chance and i really find it sickening. it’s ironic, that the ever misogynist age of hellenistic greece, has a better grasp of how disgusting and horrifying this situation was that a modern, self proclaimed ‘feminist’ era.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

a traumatized character whose trauma turned them into a villain who hurts innocent people the way they were hurt vs. a traumatized character whose trauma turned them into a hero who will do anything and everything to make sure no one goes through what they went through

[one-real-imonkey]

One of my favourite things about the Book of Bill release is that for years I’ve seen people call Ford a fool for trusting Bill or believing a word he said.

“He’s a manipulator, he’s a con man, you can’t trust a word he says. He’ll say anything to get you on side.”

And now parts of the fan base are like *gasp* tragic backstory. Misunderstood baby, deserved a happy ending.

It’s like cinema.

[bebx]

mentally unstable blorbo — who has been deemed a danger to himself and society and has been wounded, wronged, hurt, abandoned, given up on ever since his youth until his trauma turned him into a "cold-blooded monster" in the eyes of others — panicking and going "I'm sorry I bit you. please don't abandon me. please don't give up on me. I can be good. I promise I can be good" with his eyes (because he'd never say any of these aloud, but he cannot hide the fear in his eyes the moment he realizes he hurts that one person who's saving him from himself and is refusing to give up on him despite what everyone else says). I will never be normal about this

[bonefall]

Clear Sky threw his son in front of a fox?!

YES!! He SHOVED him in front of a fox! It's in fury from the fact Thunder refused to kill Frost. This entire section is VERY poorly paced and glances over it in two paragraphs, so most people don't fully register it.

Clear Sky dragged Thunder down off the stump and shoves him at it, blaming him for bringing the fox to camp with his loud disobedience.

He then leaves Thunder to fight this fox on his own. Leaf and Falling Feather jump in to help him of their own accord. Clear Sky then tries to praise him for being strong and Thunder tells him to shove off for the first and last time.

It's not the last baby of his he knowingly and consciously endangers to prove a point. In Moth Flight's Vision, he refuses to allow Acorn Fur to get medical help for Tiny Branch's fox-inflicted injuries until his condition worsened, bellowing, "SkyClan does NOT ask for help unless there's no choice." AND didn't allow her to complete her training after he caused Micah's death.

Clear Sky is a serial child abuser. He is willfully neglectful, emotionally abusive, and physically violent.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm sorry I let down my guard.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[khattikeri]

i've seen discussions before on why scum villain doesn't Need an identity reveal, but part of me feels like an un-reveal where all three major Shen Qingqiu Obsessives find out on their own would nicely tie off loose ends.

yue qingyuan understanding that his xiao jiu of decades ago is gone and beginning to move on, starting to find contentment in other activities and people

liu qingge eventually realizing that his complicated feelings were for the idea of shen jiu being someone he severely misunderstood; realizing he still likes spending time with shen qingqiu, but it's different if he isn't the same man he grew up with

luo binghe conveying to shen yuan in his own way that he doesn't care that shen yuan isn't shen jiu, that even if he's a "fake", shen qingqiu is his true shizun and his husband, and everything shen yuan did as shen qingqiu did meant something to him

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

hey kings quick reminder to tag dis/course and fandom/team/character neg! i have seen some very nasty things from red AND blue pov watchers today- we're all enjoying the same series, let's be considerate of each other. purgatory is hard enough when our streamers are going thru The Torments lets not bring the torments here

[merilles]

May Le Fay

(For @queer-ragnelle's May Day Parade!)

The Queen of Avalon in all her sorceress glory with a raven companion, illuminated by the light of the stars and a crescent moon. Woe to any knight-errant who happens to come across her in the darkness of the forest!

[bethanydelleman]

Willoughby did love Marianne (but that makes him worse)

Every time I see discussions of Sense & Sensibility online, there is this implication that Willoughby is some sort of inhuman creature who is incapable of love. John Willoughby was in love with Marianne, which actually makes what he did worse.

Willoughby admits, during his super long soliloquy/confession to Elinor, that he went in meaning to trifle with Marianne but then fell in love with her, here is the important part in Ch 44: “To attach myself to your sister, therefore, was not a thing to be thought of; and with a meanness, selfishness, cruelty, which no indignant, no contemptuous look, even of yours, Miss Dashwood, can ever reprobate too much,—I was acting in this manner, trying to engage her regard, without a thought of returning it… Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her when I felt my intentions were strictly honourable, and my feelings blameless.” He also confirms in this chapter that he did mean to propose, but the Eliza/disinheritance thing happened first.

We might think Willoughby is lying, but Elinor who has a lot of time to think about it afterwards, believes him. Marianne wonders if she was deceived or if Willoughby actually did love her and Elinor assures her in Ch 47, with caveats: “It was selfishness which first made him sport with your affections; which afterwards, when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession of it, and which finally carried him from Barton.”

Moreover, we are told quite frankly by the narrator that Willoughby was in love and felt badly about how everything turned out in the end, Ch 50: “Willoughby could not hear of her marriage without a pang… gave him reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich. That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted;—nor that he long thought of Colonel Brandon with envy, and of Marianne with regret.”

As further proof, Willoughby would not have tried so hard to avoid Marianne in London if he had not been in love. He knew that his engagement to Sophia was going to devastate Marianne and he didn’t want to witness it. He also didn’t want to be reminded of what he had lost. Because he’s a coward, not a monster. As much as he pretends to think of Marianne’s feelings, he’s trying to spare himself from pain:

The next morning brought another short note from Marianne—still affectionate, open, artless, confiding—everything that could make my conduct most hateful. I could not answer it. I tried—but could not frame a sentence. But I thought of her, I believe, every moment of the day. If you can pity me, Miss Dashwood, pity my situation as it was then. With my head and heart full of your sister, I was forced to play the happy lover to another woman!

So to sum up, Willoughby did love Marianne, he did mean to propose to her the day that he left Barton, but his fear of (relative) poverty was stronger than his love for Marianne. Willoughby is selfish, he did mean to sport with Marianne’s feelings, and he did abandon the pregnant Eliza, but he’s not some inhuman monster who is incapable of feeling. He’s a rather careless and he took the cowardly, dishonourable way out: he leaves suddenly instead of telling Marianne the truth. He marries Sophia instead of retrenching and getting out of debt through patience and hard work. The fact that his love didn't overcome adversity doesn't mean it wasn't real. It just means that he is both capable of love and able to destroy the heart of the woman he loves.

His actions would be far less reprehensible if he was incapable of love.

[sunderwight]

SV AU where, while Luo Binghe is supposed to be in the Abyss, Shen Qingqiu comes across a hellhound puppy.

Now, there is an arc in PIDW where Luo Binghe became a hellhound. But it happened like at least a century out from where they are in the timeline, after Binghe had come into his full demonic power, and involved him turning into a slavering beast that eventually become a slavering man-beast (werewolf, basically) who could only be cured by having a lot of very questionable sex with his wives. Shen Yuan wrote a rant about how yet another potentially interesting transformation arc was instead reduced to porn tropes, but it was one of several dozen such rants across many similar story arcs. Airplane barely even remembers writing it because he was having a pretty shit week and just wanted to get the chapters out.

So it doesn't really occur to either him or Shang Qinghua that finding a hellhound puppy might be suspicious. Unexpected, sure, but demons are turning up all over the place all the time, really. And it's years before Luo Binghe is even supposed to be out of the Abyss, like a century before his hellhound transformation story, and when Binghe did turn into a hellhound his two forms consisted of a fully-grown beast and a fully-grown man-beast. Not a puppy.

Of course: that hellhound puppy is definitely Luo Binghe.

He unwittingly triggered this subplot early, and because he's still a young adult, he gets stuck in a juvenile puppy form because hellhounds don't reach fully maturity until they're like fifty.

Anyway, this creates something of a pickle for Luo Binghe, because he's legitimately stuck in this form and can't figure out how to change back. This is not part of his plans. He's fleeing from Huan Hua Palace cultivators who are trying to kill him, which they might succeed at because his Heavenly Demon powers don't seem to be working.

He runs right into Shizun, who is on one of his "investigate stuff to forget the depression" field trips with Liu Qingge.

Luo Binghe is fully expecting his righteous Shizun to kill the demonic beast, and has a moment to think that at least that's better than being killed by Huan Hua, before Shizun rescues him instead.

Shen Qingqiu, meanwhile, is actually kind of excited. There was a lot of lore in PIDW about how hellhounds can actually make loyal companions if they're trained up from young enough of an age, but finding hellhound puppies would be difficult for anyone who wasn't a demonic nobleman, and most of the "trained" hellhounds just disappeared into the harem as gifts to various demon wives and were never seen or heard from again. No additional information, like the full extent of their abilities or what kind of companions they made beyond "loyal" or anything! A species of demon that could even potentially be domesticated by humans, and it was just left at that?!

Needless to say, Shen Qingqiu's not letting Huan Hua Palace kill this one. This is a rare chance for him to get a cool monster companion!

Although... such a creature might die when Luo Binghe comes to take his revenge.

Well, he'll deal with that when he has a chance. Maybe Shang Qinghua can take it to Mobei Jun or Shen Qingqiu can find another place for it before then. In the meanwhile, at least going back to Qing Jing Peak with him is better than being killed on the spot. He talks Liu Qingge into going along with it (Liu Qingge thinks he's insane but also folds like wet tissue paper), under stipulation that the hellhound's demonic energies are sealed and it gets muzzled before they bring it back with them.

Shen Qingqiu rides with it in a carriage, and feels so bad for the poor doggo looking miserable without his demon powers or even his mouth free that he secretly takes the muzzle back off while Liu Qingge isn't looking.

Luo Binghe is overwhelmed with the mixed sentiments of confusion (doesn't his shizun hate demons? is a Heavenly Demon really so especially repulsive to him?), happiness (he's going home! Shizun found him and is taking him home!), worry (Shizun please do not un-muzzle random demonic beasts just because they look sad!), and some rather embarrassing personal revelations about the appeal of being Shizun's pet. The latter situation worsens exponentially after the first time he gets good boy'd and petted for the first time.

Regardless, Shen Qingqiu does take him back to Qing Jing Peak and settles in to train and observe his new puppy. No one thinks this is precisely a good project but it is a project, and is not for instance "staring blankly into the distance while kneeling in front of a sword mound", so on balance everyone decides they'll just keep an eye on things and make sure the hellhound doesn't maul the peak lord. Lots of "just dropping in for a visits" by a rotating cast of peak lords (they have a schedule).

But the hellhound puppy is a fabulous pet! Actually, Shen Qingqiu thinks it's really remarkable how smart and readily tamed he is? Barely a few days in and he's obediently following Shizun's commands, except for "stay", which he seems to struggle with. He doesn't maul or threaten any of the disciples, only growls at Shang Qinghua sometimes and makes a few aggressive displays at Liu Qingge. The former case is just good taste, and as to the latter, well, clearly the hellhound is sensitive and intelligent, and has a more-than-rudamentary understanding of words spoken to him. He probably remembers that Liu Qingge wanted to kill him when they first met. Shen Qingqiu takes his time soothing his puppy and assuring him that he won't come to any harm, he's perfectly safe on Qing Jing Peak with Shen Qingqiu.

At least, for now.

Although actually, the more Shen Qingqiu thinks about it, the more convinced he becomes that Hellhound (sue him, he's not the best with names) would be a perfect companion for Luo Binghe once he gets out of the Abyss. The only difficulty would be in how to convince Binghe to accept him, and also how to keep his now-loyal hound from trying to defend his master when justice comes due. Shen Qingqiu figures he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it, and in the meanwhile takes some time to explain to Hellhound about his disciple, Luo Binghe, who is enduring a terrible trial in the Abyss, but who will return one day having become Emperor of the Demon Realms and could probably use a steadfast and intelligent companion who is interested in more than just his incredible amounts of power or irresistible good looks.

Luo Binghe Himself: ?!?!?!

[yuridovewing]

im going to become the joker

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I love you misunderstood villain who’s been through the worst kind of hell and wasn’t able to come out of it unscarred.

I love you villain who is well understood and just likes doing bad things for pure pleasure.

I love you villain who is loved by the fandom.

I love you villain who is hated by the fandom.

I love you villain who has to cry alone and lick their wounds in the dark because they’re too scared to let anybody see them vulnerable.

I love you villain who’s not scared to shout all their pain and trauma at the top of their lungs for the world to hear.

I love you villain who’s on their knees begging to be accepted and loved for once.

I love you villain who never bows down to anyone.

I love you villain who hides their scars like their deep, dark secrets.

I love you villain who shows their scars like trophies from the battles they won.

I love you villain who wants to create a better world, even if their way of trying to achieve the goal is different than hero’s.

I love you villain who wants to burn the world down.

I don’t do that Anti Shit in my house

[starry-eyed-psychopomp]

Kind of obsessed with that part in the Banyue arc where everyone is talking about the dual demonic state preceptors of Yong’an and Banyue, wondering if they’re working together, and meanwhile Xie Lian is standing over in the corner like 🫥

Like he’s probably thinking, no, of course not, I never trained some preceptor from Banyue. And anyway I didn’t actually do that massacre, I just took the blame for the greater good and allowed myself to be tortured and killed over and over for a century as justice. It’s totally different!

And then, come to find out, the other state preceptor is in fact his beloved adopted daughter who took the blame for a massacre for the greater good, then allowed herself to be repeatedly tortured and killed as “justice” for over a century, and she did so specifically because she wanted to be just like him.

What I’m saying is Xie Lian really can’t catch a break, and neither can any kid he raises