Pulling a Xehanort (Spoilers for Kingdom Hearts 3, Legion, 13 Reasons Why etc) · 7:21pm Sep 6th, 2019
For the record, I am unfamiliar with most of these shows and other media except from my research on TvTropes. Without further ado:
There has been a recent trend of giving previously deplorable bads guys redeeming or sympathetic qualities. Now, it wouldn't be so bad if those qualities in question were consistent with the characters. Sure, MLP had a habit of redeeming bad guys but at least they kept a bit of consistency. For example, Discord is a creature of pure chaos so it would be easy to interpret that he didn't fully understand basic morality (though I have a headcanon that he draws the line at killing and turning ponies into stone and other inanimate objects) and, when he finally had a friend who forgave him for his actions and genuinely trusted him, he felt bad when his carefree chaos making nearly cost him that friendship (granted, he relapsed but at least he felt bad before Tirek stole all his magic). Or maybe he did understand morality and chose to be the bad guy, only stopping when, again, somepony was willing enough to become his friend in spite of all the bad things he did. It made sense (and made even more sense with the power of hindsight). Oh, and there's Thanos from the MCU but, up until Infinity War, we knew next to nothing about him other than he's a galactic conquerer. And when we saw him as a complex villain with good intentions (even if he does have a slight ego problem and is a little crazy, but hey, name one villain that isn't like that) everyone on the internet declared him to be one of the best villains in recent years. Even when his past self tried to destroy all of reality, it was because he now knew there are some people in the universe that aren't thankful for his culling of half of the universe in the name of balance. Hell, even his habit of having his adoptive daughters fight each-other with the loser being forced to have cybernetic implants makes sense because he loves them in his own way and wants them to be stong so they can survive anything. Survival of the fittest after all.
But these guys? These. Fucking. GUYS?!!!
Exhibit A: Xehanort himself. Sure, there were in-game reports in Birth By Sleep that showed he had good intentions but his actions in the games themselves show that he is far beyond redemption at that point and any good within him is gone. I mean, hello, he was willing to risk an apocalypse to just to sate his own curiosity! That doesn't scream "misunderstood good guy"! And that's not even getting into the fact that he was trying to make Terra succumb to darkness so he could take over his body and live on to continue his work. And what happens near the end of Kingdom Hearts 3? I'll let Just A Pancake answer that question for you (more specifically, at 6:01):
In summary, all his talk of darkness in the previous games now make him out to be a massive hypocrite. And that is all I have to say on the matter.
Exhibit B: Bryce Walker from 13 Reasons Why
(sighs) Another reason to NOT watch the show. Between glorifying suicide (whether it was intentional or not) to trying to make a serial rapist sympathetic in spite of making him absolutely despicable in a previous season. In fact, this was the straw that broke the camel's back and convinced me to make this blog post. As you know, I like spending time on TvTropes, in spite of no longer having a TvTropes account. Since I find bad guys that are pure evil to be intriguing, I spend a considerable amount of time looking at the cleanup thread for the Complete Monster page on TvTropes. And this page right here perfectly sums up why it's not smart to humanize a character that you are supposed to loathe:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=6vic3f9h1cy5qivsenw8llok&page=7265
Exhibit C: The Shadow King
Yeah, this one is pretty annoying since the version of him from the comics was pretty damn nasty and, up until this point, the version of the Shadow King from the Legion television series lived up to the comic's nastiness reputation. But...well...I'll let this trope I found on the character folder for the Legion page do the talking:
Heel–Face Turn: ... Sort of. He doesn't really turn good (something that, as one can see in the rest of his tropes, would be next to impossible), but, having come to love David in his own way, he decides to change the past by letting him have a normal, happy life with his biological parents.
So he decides to let the protagonist, you know, the one he had been mentally torturing for a while and even bodyjacked at some point, have a happy life?! Boo!
Exhibit D (possibly): President Snow from The Hunger Games.
Now this one is an interesting example in that he wasn't given redeeming qualities in the main book series itself. However, there is news of a prequel book focusing on him. And from what I read, he is going to be portrayed as a heroic figure in this prequel novel. While a hero slowly becoming a monster isn't anything new and can actually be pulled off pretty well (Griffith from Beserk and The Plutonian from Irredeemable are good examples of heroic figures slowly becoming the worst of the worst) but what gives me concern is that there's apparently going to be a romance between him and a tribute. And how many of you want to bet that this romance of theirs would end in tragedy?
You see, President Snow was a very nasty bugger in the books, whose crimes include torture, brainwashing, using children as human shields as well as being the leader of the totalitarian regime responsible for organizing the Hunger Games and just making Katniss' life a living hell. So trying to make him sympathetic...is not going to end well, to say the least. In fact, I'm not the only one who agrees this is a bad idea:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/22/extract-from-hunger-games-prequel-sparks-anger-among-fans
Dishonourable mention: Zebediah Killgrave/The Purple Man
Here we go, the basis for Kilgrave (who, for the record, is one of my favourite villains thanks to David Tennant's fantastic performance) from Jessica Jones. Now, compare how they handled Purple Man to how they handled Kilgrave. Here's this I found on the Daredevil character page on TvTropes (yes, he started out as a Daredevil villain before antagonizing Jessica Jones in the comics):
Driven to Suicide: By the 2016 Jessica Jones series he's become so burnt out that he seeks Jessica out because as the only one who "understands" him he believes that she can help him find some kind of purpose in life or remove his abilities or assist him with relearning how to be good and normal. After repeatedly pestering her to aid him or at least tell him what to do, Killgrave apologizes for everything and then kills himself after Jessica just keeps telling him to "go."
Purple Man: I see your point. I'm sure it's why I came here. I just needed... I don't know.
Jessica: You—you said—you said your powers, you couldn't be--
Purple Man: No. I said I think you couldn't do me in. I didn't say what I could do. I know what to do.
Jessica: N—
In the Jessica Jones Netflix series, Kilgrave only used his powers for good for like one episode. And in that one episode, it shows that he is still the same selfish psychopath he was in every other episode. For example, he asked Jessica how many people does he need to save to bring his body-count down to zero, to which she responds with "Saving someone doesn't mean unkilling someone else". Was Kilgrave bothered by this? Haha! No he fucking wasn't! Here's the clip for context:
See that? Even when he's trying to be good, he's still a nasty bugger that immediately goes back into old habits. Here's an excerpt from his TvTropes folder:
Good Feels Good: When Jessica pressures him into using his power to stop a hostage crisis, he himself is surprised it felt nice, largely because of the awe and admiration from the family he rescued. It doesn't last long though, and it's immediately clear to Jessica that he would never do such a thing of his own accord or because it's the right thing to do. Even when he's doing good things, it's for his own benefit.
And do you know what I find really interesting about Kilgrave? Unlike his comic-book counterpart, he has a legitimately sad backstory and yet it doesn't justify who he is now in the slightest. That right there is how you can make a villain complex while making them pure evil!
PS: If it's any consolation, most of the villains I mentioned still wind up dead in the end.
The only major problem with this is that his reports in Birth By Sleep actually kind of hint that half of this was his motivation all along. While it is true that Xehanort was probably never meant to be quite as sympathetic as Kingdom Hearts III made him out to be, he was most likely always meant to be closer to the mark than, say, Darth Sidious.
With that in mind, Xehanort's closest psychological equivalent pre-KH3 might probably be best understood as Voldemort, a dysfunctional orphan with antisocial and agitatedly depressed tendencies. While on the surface, Xehanort seems to be more like Palpatine due to his grandiosity and deceptive tendencies, going into his reports and even his BBS motivations points to a completely different person, not a person suffering from lack of fear and understanding of morality and is overly in love with himself, but rather somebody who finds fault with literally the whole damn Universe, which points less to psychopathy and more to a combination of agitated depression and antisocial personality disorder. We aren't told much about Xehanort's real backstory, but most of the really gentle hints seem to point to him being an orphan, which...yep, that would do it. That's why he can't find anything right with anything, even if it's perfectly sound, he's built so much of his identity around everything being flawed that he has no idea what to do when everything is right.
All of this being said, ultimately, you are very right: Xehanort's last scene in KHIII still overpitched the sympathetic streak a little bit. Voldemort, like Xehanort, really was a depressed orphan who doesn't know how to be happy, but the Harry Potter books don't suddenly treat him as a good guy during his last scene. Just a pathetic, pitiable wretch. Maybe that's how KHIII should have played up Xehanort instead.
5168356
I suppose you have a point there. Since the reports showed a different person to who Xehanort is now(up until Kingdom Hearts III), I kinda assumed motive decay set in and (again, up until Kingdom Hearts III) he was now less interested in his original goals and more interested in seeing what would happen. But yeah, he is definitely the Voldemort of Kingdom Hearts.
i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/76/71/8e7671153432e4d626414c740190fd2f.jpg
They both cheated death by splitting themselves into more than one piece, with Voldy having his Horcruxes and Xehanort having Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, Xemnas, and Organization XIII (though Organization XIII is made up of Nobodies that Xehanort put bits of his heart in, if memory serves). They also tried bodyjacking a protagonist, with Xehanort succeeding in taking over Terra's body while Voldemort failed in possessing Harry. They both have young counterparts (Young Xehanort and Tom Riddle). Oh, and they're both bald in the present day.
I've got another example for ya:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=6vic3f9h1cy5qivsenw8llok&page=11333#comment-283306
5596012
I remember watching Batman Beyond, which was rather unimaginatively called Batman of the Future over here in the UK, when I was a teen. Good times.
I wouldn't say Derek Powers is the most heinous villain ever (although the effects of the bioweapon he intended to sell in his debut were pretty nasty to look at) but he certainly did stick in my mind for the "do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down" meme and this scene:
Definitely remember him having no sympathetic/redeeming qualities to his name so why the comics decided to give him someone to care about, I don't know.
5596023
Thinks that's bad? Look at what happened with Norman Osborn:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=6vic3f9h1cy5qivsenw8llok&page=11326#comment-283126
BTW, maybe it's me but I think you should change the blog post title to "Pulling an Orochimaru".
5596026
I don't read the Spider-Man comics so I can't say I'm familiar with how bad Norman is when he isn't the Green Goblin.
Nah. Be weird to do so now.