One Villainous Scene: Kilgrave's Confession

Thank you everyone so much for the support on this video! When I posted I had no subscribers and didn’t expect to get any views at all, so seeing the positive response has been incredibly heartwarming 💕 As most of you have noticed, this is currently my only video. There are more coming! IRL I am a full-time graduate student in a field that’s not even remotely related to the topics I want to make videos essays on, so my upload schedule is guaranteed to be somewhat sporadic at least until graduation. But I do have scripts written that are waiting to be filmed and edited, so if you have the patience, I’d love it if you’d stick around :) Thank you again! Also: sorry about how quick the pause to read sections are! I wanted to keep this under 30 minutes so a lot of spare thoughts ended up as on-screen text instead of spoken words. In the future I will be sure to leave them up long enough to actually pause on, oopsies

Tennant is just terrifying in the role. He sells it so well it was, at times, hard to watch

He will always be the most terrifying Marvel villain we've ever seen on screen, no grand plot, no godhood, just a twisted little boy in a man's body who can make anyone do any unspeakable act with just words. True horror.

killgrave is literally the PERFECT metaphor for abuse and manipulation. just so amazing

Can we give a shout-out to Krysten's smile in the final confrontation? A smile that clearly never reaches her eyes, more of a grimace, really. Yet Kilgrave is so clueless about body language and genuine emotion, that he falls for it anyway, giving her the opening to kill him before he even knows what hit him. No massive action scene, just one clean shot to take him down.

I keep finding more of these obscure top quality channels.

A truly apologetic Kilgrave would be a very interesting "What If..."

"There are almost know videos about him" I was astonished when the "one villainous scene" initiative was launched that nobody did a video on Kilgrave. Kilgrave as a villain and the Jessica Jones show itself is criminally under-discussed by content creators, IMO.

23:30 I discovered David Tennant through Jessica Jones. Prior to Kilgrave, I have never seen, heard, or know David Tennant. I now associate Doctor Who with Kilgrave, not the other way around. Every role David plays, I first see Kilgrave, then David himself. Still, when I watched Jessica Jones for the first time, I couldn't help but feel the same way as other people who knew David before: sympathy, hope for a redemption arc, happiness when he did something slightly good. This proved to me one thing: we don't like Kilgrave because David plays him, we like him because of the WAY David plays him. It's not his face that makes us root for Kilgrave, it's his ACTING. And that's why this character in particular is so great. The writers/creators didn't rely on David charming his way into the fans' hearts, they made sure Kilgrave was a sympathetic villain from the start.

I think he is the scariest and most realistic villain ever. Especially in the comics. Where love is totally taken out of the equation. The comic states he never raped her but he made her watch as he raped other girls. He loved the power he, quite literally, got off on it.

David Tennant might as well be one of the greatest actors to ever live.

This was a great analysis. One thing I’d recommend is having the “pause to read” sections last a couple seconds longer so it’s easier to pause at the right time (or catch when it first happens). Other than that, great job.

David Tennat really makes kilgrave, kilgrave he just suits the role perfectly I couldn’t imagine anyone playing the role

16:41 Also, in that scene, after the neighbor says she'd like to slap someone who told her that, Kilgrave looks at Jessica and she shakes her head before Kilgrave lets her go. I always loved that, because even before Kilgrave decided to play the hero he was still looking at Jessica for approval of his more invasive use of powers

As someone who has been in an abusive relationship I can only get half way through season 1 before having a big panic attack and having to take a break but even still Jessica Jones season 1 was oddly one of the most empowering experiences I've had, just to see Jess and the way her ptsd is shown made me finally feel seen and the fact that she still managed to get through it all just made me feel more comfortable in myself. And even though I destest Killgrave and what he represents, he is still one of my all time favourite villains ever right along side Mother Gothal from Tangled, Im both impressed and terrified that the writers of both could write such an accurate abusive charter. Idk what my point is with this ramble but just, Jessica Jones is and always will be one of the best things the MCU has created right along side Wandavision in a way that (In my opinion) things like Endgame never even came close to.

“He’s also played by David Tennant soooo”….That part! Ugh the hardest part when I watched this back when it aired. I just…it was HARD to remind myself that he was disgustingly evil. “Grape” usually cements my hate and disgust for ANY character, but with DT playing him, GOD it was…confusing? Still, yeah, no. He’s evil and I laugh when he spoiler gets his neck snapped. He’s abhorrent. But I will say thank God he didn’t have his Scottish accent in this…

Season 1 of Jessica Jones is the best marvel has ever offered on screen IMO.

The thing that originally gave her ptsd, was her parents and brother being killed in a car accident and her almost dying from it herself, but yes her being tortured by killgrave definitely made her ptsd worse.

at 7:43 when he tells everyone to calm down. I remember joking that it was a mistake because Jessica didn't clearly didn't look any more calm. cool foreshadowing really.

Something that feels scarily real about Killgrave is that there is a shrivel of self awareness in him that’s buried by denial. When some people are confronted by the truth of how they’ve hurt people (and they don’t want to be a person who hurts people, whether it be to protect self image or because they view themselves as the hero of their own story) often times they don’t own up to it. They’ll latch on to any excuse. “It didn’t happen that way, and if it did it wasn’t that bad, and if it was I didn’t mean it, and if I did you probably deserved it” Killgrave wants his orders to be what his victims actually like. He understands what he does isn’t nice, but he’s never needed to change before so he’s both unwilling and doesn’t understand how to put in the effort to be better. It reminds me of the character AJ from the movie Barbarian. They both understand that maybe they should try to be better but the instant doing so feels like it’s going to be any work at all they go back to being selfish and latching onto excuses.