Villains

I think that the idea of a purely evil character exists almost solely in fiction. People are never completely good or completely bad and I recognized this at a very young age. So, while other kids talked about how awesome the Ninja Turtles were or who their favorite GI Joe was, I was one of the kids who loved Shredder and Storm Shadow. My favorite episode of any cartoon in the eighties was when the good guys and the bad guys teamed up to fight a mutual enemy, probably a drug dealer. In my head, I tried to figure out what was pushing these people to achieve their goals in a way that hurt so many others.

I think that is the difference between heroes and villains. Heroes are serving others while villains are serving themselves. That's why Dracula is a jerk but that Twilight guy is a hero. The Twilight guy smashed a van to save his girlfriend but Dracula is all about his own survival. When I was a kid, bad guys always had a basic plan of "I'm going to take over the world" but then what? Maybe they had a really good plan for humanity's future but in order to make it work, they had to strip certain freedoms from people. Is that a good or bad thing? Perhaps if mankind operated more like a giant beehive, we could achieve much more. In stripping away those freedoms, I guess that would be the ultimate evil, though. People have to want to follow a leader or at least be given the illusion of choice.

Whatever. Here's an awesome Lordi video.