Because You Love to Hate Me: 13 Tales of Villainy

Villains, the deliciously wicked. We love to hate them and they hate to be loved, if only because being hated frees them from having to be good.

But even an angel has to put her halo down from time to time.

And sometimes the princess needs to get off her ass, pick up a sword, and slay the dragon herself.

Villains. Stories are nothing without them. Heroes cannot rise to greatness without them. In the absence of an enemy, our beloved protagonists are left kicking rocks in the Shire or taking tea and biscuits in a mind-numbingly cheery Spare Oom. We love villains because they turn their aches into action, their bruises into battering rams. They push through niceties and against societal restraints to propel the story forward. Unlike our lovable protagonists, villains - for better or worse - stop at literally nothing to achieve their goals. It's why we secretly root for them, why we find ourselves hoping they make their grand escape, and it's why our shoulders sag with equal parts relief and disappointment when they are caught. After all, how can you not give it up to someone who works that damned hard for what they want?... Look into a villain's eyes long enough and we might find our shadow selves, our uncut what-ifs and unchecked ambitions, a blurry line if ever there was one.

You can either choose to let the world dominate you, or you can dominate the world

I've always been the protagonist of my own story, but it's interesting to think I could be a villain in somebody else's. Somebody out there has tried to attain or achieve something, and I have stood in their way. To an extent, we're each an encapsulation of both protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain.

I could no longer deny the truth. I was not invisible to him. I was contemptible... Perhaps I deserved it. Surely I didn't deserve to be loved, for, otherwise, wouldn't I have found someone to love me by now?

Over the years, our society has become fascinated with characters who are not fully evil or fully good, but instead lie somewhere in the middle. Our obsession with antiheroes and antivillains is a result of social ideals being rewritten. We are unmaking the concept of wickedness. As the popularity of the 'heroes' in Batman, The Punisher, and Suicide Squad shows, the lines between heroes and villains have become blurred.

A horrible, heart-slamming-in-her-chest, run-run-run kind of scared. But her mother said there's no outrunning Death or the devil, so she holds her ground and tells herself there's more than one kind of quick in the world.

Her name is Grace, and she is on fire.

If other's people's bodies are temples, yours is a war machine with built-in traps, baby.

Forget what the world and society and your family want you to be. You know why? Because you are going to shape and remold that as you exist in your perfect form upon the ruinous remains of the earth.

Villains' backstories are all about opportunities and choices. Throughout, we are shown the various crossroads where they could have turned back and continued to live a life of good. We, the audience, are torn between wanting them to cross over to the dark side and hoping that maybe this time they won't. Characters with agency are more complex, which is why I love them so much. Villains do horrible things, and we still root for them in spite of that. We are drawn to people who make mistakes, like us. Very few of us are stalwart and true 100 percent of the time. Villains represent what we cannot and will not do in real life.

Coming-of-age tales and villain origins have a lot in common. Teens are fighting for their independence and against familial pressures. Villains are frequently fighting against societal and moral expectations in their origins.

...heroes represent success, the acquisition of true love, and a prosperous future, whereas villains embrace the more realistic and less glamorized version of our reality - a world in which not every problem can be solved with a sweep of a magic wand or true love's kiss." Whitney Atkinson - Glamorized Recovery: Expectation vs. Reality.

Should you be sweet and innocent? Ha. If people are underestimating your feminine power, that’s their mistake and your opportunity to strike. Don’t let it get to you. Their reaction may be initial mockery, because how dare a woman strike fear into the hearts and minds of men who laud themselves as gods? But the end result will always be the same: them begging for mercy and you giving exactly zero fucks. Yes, revenge is indeed sweet . . . and deadly.

I turn back to my wood chair and run my hands over it, checking for splinters, because nobody likes a pain in the ass.

Surely I didn't deserve to be loved, for, otherwise, wouldn't I have found someone to love me by now? (Marissa Meyer - The Sea Witch)

People are peculiar. They have a way of seeing only what they want, of not seeing anything they don’t.

After all, what was a lifetime of pain when coupled with a lifetime of bliss.

Don’t go’ is not the same as ‘stay’.

Being brave is a risk, not a mistake.

Sometimes the only way to fix a broken wall is to patch it up from within.

I’d never felt anything like it. Not then and not now. No drug has come close to it. No adventure. No dreamscape. Air beneath my feet. Darkness to hug me tight. All with the universe spread above me, speckled and humming and so damned alive…

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth.

What’s wrong with believing in fairy tales? Reality will never live up.

People leave and enter your life for a reason.

When we’re children, we can’t wait to grow up. We want to be adult – or giant-sized, yet somewhere along the way, we no longer admire and idolize the difference that we sense; we become afraid of the unknown.