As the tittle says thanos has ruined how people view villains. Everyone thinks they have to be sympathetic and you need to feel sorry for them but I’m sorry not everyone needs to be sympathetic for them to be a good villian. I saw someone on this app say “why did they make Tony montana so unlikeable in scare face” and it made me laugh honestly. Almost as if Tony montana is supposed to be a street drug dealer. And thanos isn’t even sympathetic that’s the funny thing he’s a murdering lunatic who’s a physco and wants to commit genocide to billions. I hate when they try to sympathize every villain lmao. Thanos has completely ruined how people view villians and made all these people think you need a villian to be sympathetic for them to be Great. But that’s just my opinion we need more villians who are pure evil like the penguin,joker, reverse flash, Darkseid, and Scarface. Don’t know why these people think every villian should be like thanos
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When they’re not sympathetic then they are just a storytelling prop, something to be dealt with while another story is taking place. In real life people tend to be multifaceted, shockingly enough.
Thanos wasn’t the first for this.
Hell, they made a movie just to turn the Joker into a person you could relate with and feel sorry for and he was created to be the worst villain possible.
So. That’s not a Thanos thing lol
There’s been lots of villains that have had reasonable backgrounds (Mr. Freeze)
The motivation was dumb too, they should’ve stuck with him courting Lady Death.
Agreed.
Stop making bad guys bad because “the world made me this way” before shredding an edgy guitar riff.
I love how more independent horror movies do villains these days. Virtually no background, no reason.
Even The Strangers got it right!
‘Why are you doing this?”
“Because you were home”
I would argue marvel as a whole has ruined how people see movies all together. How they tricked everyone into watching mediocre slop for so long is something I will never understand
It isn’t a Thanos thing, it is a modern media thing. Every villain needs to have a sad backstory and needs to be doing the right thing in their own way. There are not really truly evil people these days.
lol thanos is so vanilla as a villain. let a lone of a sympathetic one.
I felt bad for Tony what you mean
I definitely didn’t feel sorry for Thanos. The arrogance of thinking that you can kill half of the universe as an answer to any problem is absurdly immoral. He could have wished for any infinite number of answers to the problems he wanted to solve. Making life require fewer resources, making new stars and planets and spreading life among them. Changing the laws of physics in some way…
It’s a shallow and horrid response to one’s personal emotions regarding an issue.
Magneto trying to save mutants?
…how did Thanos do that exactly? He isn’t sympathetic.
Most well written characters with believable motivations are often at least in some regards sympathetic. Heck even the Joker has his fans for the whole “society sucks” and “people pretend to be more civilised than they really are” themes.
It’s not always shown on screen of course and thats also ok but only very few villains are written in a truly evil “i like kicking dogs because it’s fun” way. And if they are present they usually need to be diluted by having other villains there as well, perfect example being Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones, absolute insufferable character and if he was the only villain and without being taken down a peg every now and then people would have stopped watching. Pure evil, especially if not met with any comeuppance, doesn’t make a compelling story.
After the joker they definitely tried to make the villains always be a step step step ahead
I will agree with what others have said he wasn’t the first villain to be sugar coated to be sympathetic.
Hell isn’t every single iron man villain a product of the stupid things he did. Also ultron.
What I miss more with villains is reveling in being the bad guy. Like give me a early seasons spike from buffy.
That’s just one view of thanos and most people still consider him crazy
In the real world, no matter the species, race or whatever are just ass holes who do evil ass hole things
Wait people actually found Thanos sympathetic lol? I thought it was just dumb angst teenagers. There is no justification for his views and it made no sense.
Your villain doesn’t need to be sympathetic they just need to be believable
A villain should be well-rounded i.e. “sympathetic” (like any other character) but Thanos did a shitty job of it. For a much better execution of the exact same premise see Adrien Veidt in Watchmen (that I have no doubt influenced the Thanos infinity gauntlet comic story-line).
It’s not a thanos thing, in general we’ve left the “they’re the bad guys so they have to be all bad” mentality and brought nuance into shit. I think critical thinking is a valuable skill and being able to identify and be comfortable around nuance is important. We’re too brain dead these days to allow for simply evil and simply good things. I particularly like shows like the boys where the villain is widely loved except for the niche characters (5 people overall) that know he’s evil. Good way to develop a judge of character these days since parents aren’t parenting
Darth Vader fits this much better. You saw who he was before: a Hero loved by all, willing to stand up to overbearing authority. His love for his wife and unborn children doomed him to make a desperate choice that turned him into the thing he stood against. Luke his grown up son says to him, “Search your feelings, Father, you can’t do this. I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate.” Then later, “Your thoughts betray you, Father. I feel the good in you, the conflict.”
Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker changed how I view a villain.
You’re wrong on many levels. Thanos isn’t unique nor first villain to have comprehensive motivations and genuine emotions. It didn’t change how people view villains in any significant manner. People were enjoying villains like him before that.
You’re barking at an imaginary issue.
Thanos only wanted to prove that he was right. He didn’t actually care for the balance.
Thanos is evil and needs to be vexed by squirrels
For me it’s not that I have to sympathize completely, but I have to have some understanding of WHY they do what they do and background or past trauma just makes the character more interesting to follow. An antagonist doesn’t have to be evil for the sake of being evil and being able to understand why they are getting in the protagonist’s way, or causing the problem the protagonist has to solve, even if you don’t agree, gives a story an extra layer of complexity. An ending hits so much harder emotionally when you’re rooting for the protagonist, but also feel a little bad about the downfall of the villain. Some of my favorite villains are the ones who had the right intentions but we’re using the wrong methods.
Kefka and Sephiroth are the best villains ever created.
In media and viewers opinion a 100% bad guys is a ‘shallow and uninteresting’ + they want everything to have connection and ’emotional impact’
So don’t be surprised if later on every comic book villains background will be changed, especially a villain with ‘nonsense motivation’ or ‘pure criminal’ like professor pyg, deacon blackfire, firefly, carnage for example…. i bet they will change their backstory in their original media too (comics)
So the most iconic villain since Thanos is Art the Clown…
Thanos didn’t even understand exponential growth.
Downvite because thanos is nowhere near the first for this.
I agree that villains don’t need to be sympathetic, just believable. However, when you can make a villain believable AND sympathetic, it’s glorious! Just look at Magneto.
I think it’s good to confront villains that are more like everyday villains, so that their villainy is shown to be dealt with over their sympathetic arc. I don’t know if we can afford to not see that rn.
Well, yes, in real life the bad guy doesn’t tell you his master plan before he gets a chance to do it, you find out after.
There have been sympathetic villains for years.
Isn’t there a saying that every Disney villain is just the princess who didn’t get rescued in time?
I like it when the villain is likeable, that’s more realistic. But I definitely think we need more villains like the original Joker.
And, do people really feel that way about Thanos? It seems like such a random example. Even within the MCU there are better ones, like Loki or Wanda.
Ehh, this is not even remotely new. Ever heard of Darth Vader and Magneto? Or even all the anti-hero or anti-villain MCs in Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Sopranos, 24, and others in the 00s and 10s. How about Game of Thrones? Or many of the most popular battle shonen anime besides DBZ. I don’t even think Thanos was that sympathetic narratively compared to even other MCU characters like the Kingpin, he just had a bit of a basic backstory.
Wait. People think Thanos is sympathetic and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him?
I missed that.
Dude, that has been around for ages. Hell, if you want to make a case about MCU specifically, then Vulture has already beaten Thanos to that with the whole pseudo-sympathetic backstory and motivation.
The whole “I am doing this evil thing for the sake of good” has been around way long before Thanos was even conceived as an idea.
I think you’re making a sweeping assumption based on a few stupid comments. Most people are perfectly capable of loving and appreciating both sympathetic villains and also classic, simple psychopathic-style villains. A good villain is a good villain.
Also, Thanos was far from the first villain to have a somewhat sympathetic side, and I’d argue he’s not even that sympathetic. He’s more psychopathic than anything.
I mean, in superhero media alone, you have Mr. Freeze from Batman: The Animated Series, Magento from X-Men (he’s a holocaust survivor!), Doctor Octopus and Sandman from the Spider-Man trilogy, Loki from Thor, Joker from the Joker movies, etc.
And if you branch out into non-superhero media, there’s probably hundreds of examples over the last 50 years.
I mean if you hate villains you feel sympathetic to then you can blame George Lucas for creating Darth Vader as I’m pretty sure he was the first.
I think Star Wars had a good balance though because you had one villain you could kind of feel sorry for (Darth Vader) and then another with no redeeming qualities and who only craves power (Palpatine). Too much of one villain or the other gets irritating after a while.
I think in the 50s and 60s we had too many villains like Palpatine where they were just black and white evil, which was probably shaped by the black and white perspectives of Americans towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Now though we’ve swung the opposite way around where we should feel sorry for EVERY single villain. Don’t worry, give it some time and the pendulum will probs swing back, as is the case with most things.
Sympathetic villains go back to Shakespeare and before. Expand your horizons a bit, and you’ll likely find out that there isn’t a piece of modern storytelling that is original.
This is less unpopular than just not…correct…? Sympathetic villains have existed since before Shakespeare (Shylock, Iago). They’ve spent 30-odd years larding on backstory to the iconic villain of modern popular culture — Darth Vader — to the point that he’s almost emo.
There are no great pure evil villains (or anti-heroes, since a lot of references are that). Pure evil is poor character development, hard for audiences to access, and hard to build on top of for future storytelling. For the characters who do have very little sympathy or empathy to them — like a Scarface — they almost always exist to serve as the fall for a pretty moralistic theme. The World Is Yours (until your hubris fumbles it away).
Eh. People had these kind of views before thanos. He just made them louder
I feel 0 sympathy for Thanos. Thanos didn’t ruin villains. Cartoons did. The whole “I’m just evil to be evil” ruined villains. Thanos made Villains ccol again. They are supposed to have a reason they want to do shit a motivation.
Tony Montana wants money and power.
Joker wants chaos.
Darkseid domination.
Reverse Flash he wants to kill Barry Allen because Barry Allen killed him because he wanted to kill Barry Allen’s fiance.
This whole “Nah don’t think about how their motivation and actions make 0 sense” makes villains lame. And nerfs some great ones like the Reverse Flash. The villains you named whether you feel sympathy for them or not is up to you.
Reverse Flash was arguably a psycho even when he was still a fan boy of The Flash.
The Joker had a sympathetic back story before Thanos ever did.
OP has never seen a crime drama series ever.
Bro watched his first movie with a relatable villain and ran to make a post about it
The idea a villain HAS to be sympathetic is WAY older than Thanos, and has been wrong the entire time. It’s a failure to understand “a good antagonist SHOULD have reasonable motivation” and in writing antiheroes, how to keep them from becoming irredeemable people the viewer will give up on.
It also misses the difference between villain, antagonist, bad guy, and just some asshole.
Is the character instrumental to the story in opposition to the main characters? Antagonist.
Is the character doing things that oppose the main characters, objectively or morally? Villain.
Is the character just there to be in opposition to the main characters? Bad guy.
Is this character only there to be an asshole? That’s just some asshole.
Like everyone’s saying this has been a trend for a while. Good observation tho! I’ve tbh been a little tired of having these sympathized villains. Like I get the point by now. I guess that’s why I watch horror movies with pure evil now tho lol
More like super hero movies lowered expectations for movies, but are cash grabs.
The thing about great villains is that it’s not as simple as good vs evil but rather characters who think they are doing good but are doing it the wrong way.
Thanos wants to improve the universe and believes halving the population is the right way.
Completely agree with you! Villains are best when they are evil and no sympathy is needed for them. Save the troubled souls for student projects or movies with Deep Meaning. Scar has to be sympathetic in Lion King now, where when Lion King came out scar was the Bad Guy and it was okay to be totally against him. I’m hoping this is just a phase in m movies like shaky camera work a decade or so ago.
Has OP seen any other movies before the MCU?
… what? The worst written villains are the ones you can’t sympathize with. Pure evil is neither interesting nor realistic. And it’s lazy. Everyone has a backstory and motivations. The point of including that isn’t necessarily to make you side with the villain, but to understand where they are coming from.
Well the problem is the MCU didn’t go with Thanos’ original story arch. They switched it up to make him more justified and likable. In the OG comics Thanos was much worse and if they went with that he would’ve been a much more interesting villain.
this is why i enjoyed the villain from “luca” so much. no tragic backstory where his mother was eaten by a sea monster or whatever. he’s just an asshole. sometimes people are assholes!
There were sooo many sympathetic villains before this. Hell, even damon from the vampire diaries back in 2009 can fit this category
Tony Montana so unlikable 🤣. He became such a cultural icon that people wanted to BE him.
But I agree, people really love to say “you know, x-villain ACTUALLY wasn’t so bad. They had their reasons”
This definitely doesn’t start with Thanos. I think if you go back to the oldest examples of villains you can feel some sympathy or understanding for. It’s not even really a thing that is a trope or that exists just in stories, it is just reality. Most “villains” are people taking radical action that they believe will do something good in a way that society might not accept.
Nobody mentioning M. Bison yet?
Who
To have a back story on a villain can create a believable one.
Okay you have a robber as a villain in a story, the guy has a back story of having an unstable household and abusive parents…couldn’t even finish school, got laid off, whatever else. That is a believable as it is a realistic outcome of their past. Many people might hold empathy and sympathy to that situation.
The joker, thanos, and many others, while these situations won’t hit the nail on the head for many, metaphorical themes could be related to. It is the instance of adding art to evil. But adding art to evil doesn’t mean we should praise the villains. Also, to grab the viewers attention and keeps them on their toes, to test society, pulling heart strings on peoples morals and confusing them is what keeps the movies going.
The Jeffery Dahmer show (which I cannot say I agree and actually nearly puked watching it so I never finished) people were feeling sympathy for a brutal man that was a serial killer.
Controversially, Luigi as in the guy that murdered the CEO of UH. he still murdered the guy which is terrible. However, people find sympathy for his doings which is why it is still controversial.
I think there is a level of this that can screw with the thought process of reality. So I think there should be a limit on what heart strings a villain can tug. As we have villains in the real world, we as people need to be aware of that— they are still doing awful things (refer to the Dahmer example)
Why do you think Thanos was the first popular sympathetic villain?
This has been going on for literally hundreds of years.
For a serious drama, yes, your villain should be sympathetic and/or relatable, reasonable, or understandable. Unlike a movie like Austin powers where it knows it’s being goofy, the villain doesn’t have to be logical or reasonable. They can be a mustache twirling evil villain.
It’s all about the tone set for the movie, if you’re gonna have an action packed character drama then the villain needs to be great. If it’s some “lolz” comedy schlock then the villain should pull out all the villain tropes.
I never felt sympathetic towards Thanos so they did a very poor job
They don’t need to be sympathetic, but a good villain should feel like they’re goal is noble. I would say that Killmonger is a good example of this: he robbed a museum, killed multiple innocent workers, “killed” T’Challa, stole the throne of Wakanda, but then used his position of power to try to change the world for what he believed was the better. The fact that he had a noble goal was a big part of why he was popular, despite not being sympathetic. This makes for a more complex villain than someone like Malekith in Thor 2, who simply wanted to make the universe better for himself.
I think OP is pointing the blame at the wrong character. No one was sympathetic towards Thanos, we just got a nice explanation of his motives.
If OP were to mention Walter White and how people vehemently defend his horrible actions, that would be a different discussion.
….you’re almost there, just say it “Marvel ruined Cinema”.
OP is whatever comes after GenA.
imo making villains relatable makes people able to relate with real life villains. which are not real bc no one is pure evil even though it sure seems like it sometiemes
Sympathetic villains have been around since always. Shakespeare had Iago and Shylock and Caliban and tried to give them compelling motivations that would make them more than just moustache-twirling villains (unlike Don John from Much Ado About Nothing who is literally that in his own words, because it’s a comedy).
All Thanos did that makes him notable was to play the role in a giant blockbuster movie that tons of people saw. His motivations were unbelievably simplistic such that a five year old could grasp them, so a lot of people whose experience with story is limited such that they only recognize strictly good heroes and strictly evil villains suddenly paid notice to a villain who was more than that.
Was Thanos supposed to be sympathetic. I clearly missed that