Here’s a hot take: villains should be relatable.
Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
True, and this is true in the context of history too. We need to talk about how nazis and slave owners and colonialists were people just like us who seemed ‘nice’ and cared about their dog. We need to remind ourselves that, yes, a person that seems nice and loves their dog can still be a real nazi and yes, nice people can do all the horrors of history all over again. This shit is important.
Nazis aren’t nice people tho, they’re just lying
Abusers groom their character witnesses just as carefully as their victims
And IMHO, this ‘nazis are people too’ bs needs to stop, because they’re not, they are soulless dead-eyed daemons! Yall just need to learn to see through their bullshit
We share the world with monsters, the fact that they eat and sleep and live and work amongst us doesn’t make them less monstrous, it makes them more so
Humanising them only protects them, only makes it more difficult for us to do what needs to be done (because human beings can’t stand to do harm – unlike fascists who actively enjoy it) they are not like us and the pretense that they are is misguided at best and out and out propaganda at worst
It’s counter productive and wholly unsupported Stop it!
I’m gonna have to disagree with you there.
Look, liberal media pieces that humanize nazis in an attempt to make you listen to their fucked up nazi arguments are shit. Very shit. That kind if nazi apologism needs to stop
Understanding that nazis – like cops – are pretty normal people with regular emotions doing an extremely extremely evil thing that needs to be stopped at all cost is just common sense.
I know it makes it easier for some of us to fight nazis if we imagine that they are soulless monsters who torture puppies and only fake-cry and steal from their grandmother, and if that works for you as an antifascist then you do that. If that concept helps your antifascism, hang on to it.
But the reality is that normal people with regular emotions ARE capable of doing absolutely monsterous things and history constantly shows that to be true.
We need to acknowledge that and recognize that they should be punched in the face anyway.
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
– Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Good quote. I’m rather disappointed that most other replies on this post which claimed to agree with me also argued for being nicer to nazis. That is not my point at all.
My point is that you won’t spot the next Eichmann if you think you need to be on the look out for monsters.
And my point is that when you meet the next Eichmann caring for kittens and crying to soft music and donating blood while also being prepared to run concentration camps and kill whole population groups, you need to recognize that Eichmann despite his genuine human traits and put a bullet through his head.
And the same goes for recognizing all the people willing to play a small part in letting the next Eichmann do his job.
QueerAnarchism 