Just a gentle reminder:
- The Jackal was not restoring glory to the nation.
- Blofeld was not a wealth creator.
- Norman Osborn was not a tech genius.
- Agent Smith was not fighting for order.
- Colonel Jessep was not upholding honour.
- The Joker was not a misunderstood artist.
- Lex Luthor was not a visionary.
- Rahul Mehra was not in love.
They were the villains. That was never in dispute.
And yet, somewhere along the way, we began to look at them differently, not as cautionary tales but as case studies in complexity, as tragic figures wronged by a world that failed to understand them. We turned pathology into character depth, recast cruelty as charisma, and began to admire, with growing comfort, the very things we were once meant to recoil from.
Perhaps it began as curiosity, a desire to look beneath the surface, to understand what makes evil tick. But slowly, insidiously, that curiosity turned into something else: fascination, even empathy, until eventually, we began to forget who we were meant to fear. And worse, who we were meant to become.
This is not nuance. It is not intellectual honesty. It is not depth.
It is just forgetting. And in that forgetting, a quiet erosion begins. Of moral clarity. Of cultural memory. Of our collective instinct to know right from wrong without needing to be told. And then, that gives rise to new ‘heroes’, people who we mistake for saviours, for the good ones, and celebrate, even pedestalise them. Except that if they were cast in any of our favourite franchises, we’d recognise them for what they are. Evil.
But today, we have not just blurred the lines. We have redrawn them altogether.
And if we no longer recognise the villains, what chance do the heroes have?
This is not commentary. This is decay.
P.S.: To those who think these characters I named correspond to current players on the world stage, all I can say is I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations.
