#mccreeandme

������������ I love how you think. I'm not even sure how to put it into words but everything you say is just...deep. You give such detailed responses and meta and i get excited every time I see a post from you. Also I saw your tags on that post about villains last night. The one about how people who are marginalized tend to sympathize with villains more and...God, I never thought of it that way.

@mccreeandme jkalsfjlksd AHHH THANK YOU ♥ That's so sweet and I'm honestly, truly grateful. (And I hate that the post isn’t playing nice with your emojis--dammit, Tumblr) It's a little like that Guillermo Del Toro quote, about how he sympathizes more with monsters in movies and in fiction. Villains are (more often than not) monsters that are human--human as a species, and human in the sense of flawed, layered, complex, and on some level, relatable. We have to be able to see ourselves in the protagonists and the antagonists, both as models of behavior that we should strive for and cautionary tales of things that we need to avoid/heal from.

But not everyone who likes villains is going to be in a position where they can choose to heal from what’s hurting them, from what’s inflicted on them, from what makes them “othered” or outcast or shunned, etc. There are some things marginalized people go through that is out of their control to really stop, whether it be an internal illness or an external source, and that’s where I think a lot of people (non-villain posi people) don’t understand why villains can be so appealing.

Villains have found a way to take their pain, their damage, their abuse--the things that are meant to destroy and diminish them--and turn it into a position of power. They find a way to make their suffering mean something, because it’s often not their fault at all that they’re suffering in the first place. These are hurt, damaged people who not only have to bear the weight of whatever hurt them, they also have to be responsible for the damage and the harm and the hurt inflicted on them (as in, now it’s their job to deal with this horrible shit that they never wanted in the first place), and I think it’s absurd to judge them for handling this poorly (or with anger, violence, manipulation, aggression, etc). Not everyone is going to know the right way to handle a situation! Not even in real life do we know this! There is such a thing as “messy” trauma survivors! Not everyone is going to be saintly and forgiving and ~well-behaved~ when it comes to shit that eats away at them!!

Monsters and those who can relate to them are often people who have known some measure of suffering, or trauma, or pain, usually through illness, or prejudice, or abuse. Things have been inflicted onto them that most people can never know, will never experience, and can only experience vicariously, on a shallow level, through fiction. These lucky people relate more to the protagonist because they see a “good” person going up against someone “bad” and they think, oh, okay, that “bad” person has to be stopped. But for people who see more of themselves in the villain, it’s not an issue of stopping the villain per se, but stopping the cause of their behavior (which is often, y’know, the villain’s choices or their skewed perspective of their pain).

And like I said, obviously this is a generalization and I don’t think that everyone who has suffered in some way will always like or support villains. I just think it’s something the people who criticize or outright antagonize people who do like villains don’t even stop to consider. Me liking villains is as much a way of coping and catharsis and healing as anything I learn in therapy, as taking care of my body, as taking my medication, etc. Understanding villains--especially those I see myself in, either from an emotionally resonant perspective or even just having gone through the same shit they were written to endure--helps me understand myself, and it helps me grow, change, etc. It’s also useful in writing lol

Thank you, bb! That man is detrimental to my health, bless!

Going by the bulge, he probably wears boxer briefs. Its sitting there just right

Same please tag me if you wouldn't mind I'm so ready for this

mccreeandme replied to your post “I’m awake and you all have to deal with it. I’m also typing up the...”

Can you tag me too please???