Trope Talk: Are We The Baddies?

Maybe the real villains were the friends we made while we were being indoctrinated as children.

Protagonist: “I love squishing kittens with warm hugs!” Villain: “Yes, COUGH yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing here.”

"In real life you can't judge a book by its cover, but in fiction that is what the cover is there for." True words to live by.

“Growing up, we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history, and that somehow, the war was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was. The people of the world are terrified by the Fire Nation. They don’t see our greatness. They hate us!“ -Zuko’s “It Turns Out We’re The Baddies” speech to Ozai

This trope is so much more powerful when the protagonist actually questions the worldview they held, rather than just swaps over to the other side without thought.

Minion: Boss? Are we evil? We have skulls, our castle looks like a mess of spikes and we have those firebreathing dragons. Me: No. Once again we are not evil. We are stoics. The skull should remind us and the enemy that we are going to die. Our castle has thorns BECAUSE we don't want that our dragons overlords land on our towers. I would love to have nice normal towers but dragons can't read and thorns are the best way to tell them "don't land here, please".

Weirdly enough Bastion from Overwatch is a great example of this. He's a war bot mass produced and ununique, he gets shut down mid battle only to awake 20 years later by a bird nesting on him and the battlefield has grown into a forest. He still has the directive to destroy the nearby city and kill as many humans as possible so he marches towards it through the forest, along the way encountering things that start to awaken a personality and sense of free will, like hearing a woodpecker and mistaking it for gunfire which leads to him destroying a section of forest and being upset when the wildlife that didn't mind his presence before now runs in fear. Eventually he overrides his directive and returns to live peacefully in the forest with his pet bird.

"Are the orphans enjoying the new playground?" This is something I never heard a villain say, ever.

I love the low-key roasting of the “pretty people are the good guys” trope in the first half of the video.

A good irl example: one of the doctors running human experiments at Auschwitz did everything in their power to save as many people as possible. Basically, he did some messed up things to be a doctor at Auschwitz and told to do human experiments. But he had his own “wait, holy shit, this escalated a lot more than I’m comfortable.” But he was already neck deep in literal Nazism, with no way out. And further, if he left, someone who was enthusiastic about that would replace him. So what did he do when he realized he was one of the baddies? He started making up bogus experiments. “No no no you can’t take these people for the amputation experiment. I need them for my very important work.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors he did nothing to those people. In the Nuremberg trial, he was the only one to be released with all charges dropped because the Holocaust survivors vouched for him and testified on his humanitarian actions. If I remember right the story is referred to as “the good man of Auschwitz.” So really, an “are we the baddies” moment doesn’t need the character to defect. They may just start to try to limit the damage that they can.

"Sometimes when a character realizes they're the bad guy, instead of flipping to be more heroic, this actually causes them to double down." As Jeff Winger said, "Now that I realize that that was my goal... I can really roll up my sleaves and get it done."

I like the trope of “Are we evil?” “Well… we’ve done some horrible things, but these rebels did this” “yeah that was pretty fucked, but we have to be better than them”

Red: "...or a single conversation with a suspiciously beautiful rebel." Video: Adora getting starry-eyed over meeting a horse for the first time. ...I mean, yeah, I guess it fits!

It's extra fun when the darkly dressed and spooky faction is actually the good side, and the high and pure faction is evil.

It can also be interesting to have the newly-defecting hero "run out" of trust. After believing in the evil empire their whole life and suddenly learning of its evil side, they're so shaken they can't really trust the rebels entirely either. They end up repeatedly questioning the rebels' actions and prying into every possible secret because they were burned by trusting the empire and now feel the need to ensure the side they're on isn't hiding something evil as well. This, of course, makes the rebels trust them way less. Maybe they even end up splitting from the rebels and going off on their own for a bit.

"Boss, why do we call ourselves the Kitten Squishers?" A cloud of psychic kittens causes horrific violence "That, minion, is why. We must protect the world from this menace!"

8:38 Katara: Aang, I need you to help me avenge my mother's death by killing someone. Aang: Killing is wrong, you should choose forgiveness. Katara: ..... Zuko, I need you to help me- Zuko: I'm already packed.

"If redemption arcs are only for characters who haven't really done anything too bad, they're not really redemption arcs, they're self-indulgent angst arcs." OH MY GOD YES THANK YOU RED

"If redemption arcs are only for characters who haven't done anything too bad, they're not really redemption arcs." FUCKING. THANK YOU!!! The idea of: "Too evil to be redeemed" has always bothered me, because it comes with an implied message that you don't have to bother trying to fix your terribleness so long as you become terrible ENOUGH. So rather than trying to get better, these people should just double down on their evilness.

"it's never too late to stop digging" is SUCH good advice.