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[feotakahari]

I saw an essay once that argued that shows like She-Ra allow for the redemption of villains by not actually showing that much villainy. We see Hordak’s followers destroying buildings civilians live in, but we don’t see them directly murdering civilians, so Hordak doesn’t have to face audience judgment for it.

On the one hand, this makes it sound like Steven Universe really dug its own grave by showing onscreen medical experimentation on POWs. On the other hand, I never got the impression that She-Ra fandom was any less of a screaming mess than Steven Universe fandom. So maybe the mess in both fandoms is unrelated to war crimes or lack thereof.

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

Going up a meta level, I can think of a maybe kind of contrarian argument that a villain whose villainy lends itself relatively easily to this treatment might be the sort of person who might be easier to redeem.

I've had the thought that one way dictators, kings, etc. can order purges, massacres, and other atrocities is the experience of doing so doesn't really feel like violence to them. They just order something done or sign a piece of paper or something, and their mooks do all the actual dirty work. They know intellectually that they're ordering somebody's death, ordering a village destroyed, etc., but that knowledge is basically intellectual/System 2 to them, they don't FEEL it deep down in System 1 where a person's emotions really live. This is a manifestation of privilege, of course; they don't have to get their hands dirty; they get to outsource the most directly soul-destroying parts of doing violence to people with less power than them. I think it might be relatively easy to follow this writing strategy to set up a villain like this for a redemption arc; we don't see them doing anything directly violent, so their pre-redemption evil can be kept as kind of an informed attribute, something we know about intellectually but don't feel on a System 1 level. They can be written as personally charming, nice in interpersonal interactions, etc., and we will tend to notice this more viscerally than we notice that they once ordered an entire planetary population massacred or something. And I think this kind of reflects what turning to the side of good might feel like for such a person; they fundamentally just need to change their mind about some relatively abstract political stuff. They might feel guilty about stuff they did before, but this guilt would be likely to be at a relatively abstract intellectual level.

Now take one of this person's mooks, one of their Stormtroopers, one of the people who actually did the shooting bound prisoners in the head execution style and burning people's houses and killing babies and so on. It'd be harder to do the "keep their bad deeds offscreen" strategy with them (I mean, it could be done, easiest way is to introduce them just as they defect like Finn, but the contrivance might be more visible). And I think that might actually parallel them being in a sense more committed to the side of evil. They'd have to be more emotionally committed to what they're doing to keep doing all this direct violence. Their commitment to the idea that the violence and cruelty they're doing is OK would have to reach deeper, down to where their emotions really live.

In a sense this seems very unfair. The high-level desk jockey commander villain is actually responsible for more bad deeds, and their relative emotional insulation from what their choices mean at ground level is a manifestation of privilege. It's like how a racist Congressperson or CEO doesn't have to rant and rave and beat you up like some alt-right street thug, they can ruin the lives of thousands of non-white people while speaking in a polite and level tone and sipping some tea in a meeting room somewhere; prioritizing this sort of superficial "niceness" as a marker of decency inherently favors people with wealth and power, who can inflict great suffering without needing to raise their fist or their voice. On the other hand, y'know, that's the nature of privilege: it's unfair.