Should Villains Really Be That Bad?

YES THEY SHOULD!!

Today is going straight into rant territory everyone so if that is not your thing I don’t want you to feel obligated to read. I love you all equally!

Still here? Okay then..

Has anyone else noticed a new tread of long running series, no standalone here, trying to redeem villains or making a good character suddenly bad? I’m not a fan. I don’t mind a gradual change, like someone slowly slipping into madness, but what I’m talking about here is a hard shift for a character all in one book. So let’s talk about it.

And I also want to be clear we are talking about series that are 6,8,10,20, etc books long and the characters are WELL established.

Let’s start with the heroes, the good guys, the best friends, the reliable side kicks, the one we all want to win or at least always dreamed would get there very own book or novella. But then with a careless action on their part, or something ridiculous from another character they go from good to bad. From one of your favorites to one you wish never existed. Why? To make someone else look better? To further the current plot? Who knows, but I do know this, I have dropped series because, my favorite character isn’t always the main one so destroying a fan favorite sometimes just seems illogical or cruel. Sometimes I wonder if we have come to love them too much and we shouldn’t….

How deliciously bitter but ultimately disappointing. I like characters that I have developed a relationship with to stay where they belong so honestly I wish it would stop. Good guys are good, not secretly horrible.

Now the villains, the bad guys, the bitches everyone loves to hate, my favorites…

A good villain, evil to the core, destroying dreams every day, and willing to do things to keep making you hate them. I’m talking anything, even make you throw a book across your room. A properly constructed bad guy will go to such lengths that sometimes we wish they would be killed off already! I digress though because we are talking about the new trend, where nonredeemable characters suddenly show you a character flaw, or a weakness and we are suppose to see them as redeemable. But see that there is the problem, we have been convinced they are horrible, evil people, terrible to their very souls which is what allows us to despise them. So why the sudden attempts at redeeming these characters? And why must the redemption of these characters many times cost us characters we have grown to love? Is it feared boredom from the fandom? Is it boredom from the author?

Look some of my favorite books involve antiheroes or even a story told from a villains prospective. But I like characters that I enjoy to stay what they are presented as. So the question is am I asking too much?

Do you like it when someone who has been good for so long suddenly become bad? And not a bad boy in a good way but truly evil, a character meant to be hated. Or when a author starts to redeem a bad character (again not just a bad boy with a good heart but a truly evil being) and tries to make us sympathetic to them or accept them as good?

Thoughts?