The Belfry

aikainkauna:

fangirlasplosian:

Don’t read if you like “Jim” Moriarty from BBC’s Sherlock

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Let’s be unpopular together. I still cannot fathom why the fuck anyone thinks “shrieky twat”=”awesome villain”. No, it’s just an annoying shrieky twat. Kind of how I felt with…

Yeah, “shrieky” just says “having a snit fit,” not “ooh scary psychopath run!” to me. Maybe it’s because I knew some people who would collapse into shrieking hysterics at the least little setback that I became hardened to this sort of thing? (Maybe it’s because I’ve done that once or twice, and somehow managed not to be a villainous mastermind? Dammit. Ahem.) Anyway, whenever I see people do this, on tv or in real life, my only emotion is embarrassment, the sort you feel when anyone loses their shit in front of you and makes a spectacle of themselves. It’s unpleasant, but not menacing. Villains should be menacing.

This sort of non-villainous “villain” has been popular on tv for some time now. The “psychological realism” school of thought is probably to blame, though there is nothing unrealistic, psychologically or otherwise, about a calm, cool, collected evil character. But another thing that might have caused the latter sort of character to fall out of favor is the egalitarian impulse that has, for better or for worse, become part of Western culture. The supercilious, aristocratic sort of villain seems ridiculous to someone who has grown up in a peaceful, prosperous, bourgeois, democratic society. But they see psychological breakdowns every day (living in a peaceful, prosperous, bourgeois democracy can be very wearing on the nerves). Someone who was driven to commit mayhem due to the stresses of everyday life they can understand; someone who chose to do it because he’s smarter than everyone else and just because, well, that’s not realistic.