Rule II
Kind Is Not Nice

 

Every story needs a bad guy. Sure, sometimes the bad guy is something so wonderfully esoteric as “generational trauma” or “systemic oppression”, but every once in a while we need a villain. We love villains. They let us live through the worst of our intentions and then come out the other side feeling clean, like participating mentally and taking enjoyment from monstrous acts will leave our souls untouched. 

Which it will. Right? 

A good villain makes or breaks a story. We come to heroes for the action, but we stick around for the villains. The wonderful. The seductive. The unrepentantly evil. The monsters. 

We have, of course, already met our villain. 

Didn’t you pay attention? He already killed someone. “But,” I hear you object, “Aaron isn’t a villain! He’s just someone who thought to do some good, and besides, he didn’t know Death Notes were real! To him this was just fan fiction until suddenly it wasn’t!” 

Sure. He tried to do some good. Do you think that would hold up in court? His target is as dead as if he had pulled the trigger himself. Or, you wonder, do I really care what a proverbial court would think? He rid the world of someone who is ontologically evil, so all actions were justified, even if you don’t agree with the moral framework. 

Not that it matters, of course. 

A villain is a villain by the narrative, not by some moral standard we can apply to all stories. Not all villains are created equal, but all of them are villains. The only litmus test we have is the text itself, and this is it. The text, looking at you, right now, is telling you that Aaron Anders is the villain. Before the story is over, he will fall from whatever pedestal anyone might place him on, he will become a reprehensible shell of what he once thought he would be, and then he’ll die, cast aside by those who would’ve been nothing if it wasn’t for him. 

That’s how villain stories go, isn’t it? It’s how they should go. We learn a lesson from them, not to give in to hubris or to let ourselves be tempered by what we know is right or something like that. Villains need to fall, for us to learn our lesson. Can’t do anything with the story of a villain who thrives, can we? 

Well, maybe I couldn’t. 

Maybe you could. Maybe you’d like a story about a villain who does all the reprehensible things you always wanted to but didn’t and then gets away with it. We don’t have a lot of stories like that, after all. You’d probably like some, wouldn’t you?

Maybe Aaron will conquer the world, become its god, and live happily ever after, and everything I said above will only come to pass when he’s old and gray. Or maybe I was lying above. Maybe I’m lying here. 

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter. Aaron is a villain, and villains need something to really shine. Sure, crusades, creeds, fights, evil plots and plans and a unique gimmick (we have that one already) are all good and well, but Aaron needs one more thing. 

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A villain needs a hero. 

We know about heroes. The ones who do the right thing no matter what, who sacrifice everything for what they believe in and make the world a better place. That’s what a hero is. Someone whose own life is secondary to the good they might do. And boy fucking howdy do I have a hero for you. 

And don’t be fooled. I’ve seen Justice Leagues and Invincibles and Homelanders, and the thing is that those are deconstructions of existing heroic concepts, and not very good ones. “What if superman was an asshole.” Wow. I’m sure your mom is proud of that fifth-grade level cynical approach, but I’m sure not. It’s pedestrian, and it’s no more realistic than Superman being a boy scout. 

That’s not the kind of hero we’re talking about here. There’s heroes in this story, although they can’t fly and they certainly don’t shoot laser beams out of their eyes. No, the heroes in this story are a different breed. 

No spoilers, but one of them is a hot lady in a suit. Don’t say I never do anything for you. Yeah, you know who you are. She might dismissively scoff in your direction if you’re not careful. Have you ever had someone angrily sip champagne at you? Would you like to? 

One thing the heroes of this story are not, however, is nice. 

Kind is not nice. Sometimes, a kindness is pulling out the arrow, setting a shoulder. That’s not nice. As someone whose limbs aren’t socketed so much as they are loosely attached with cellotape, I can tell you that that shit hurts. Sometimes pain is necessary, in every sense of the word. Pain is a sign of healing, a sign of life. Progress can only be measured by how low we’ve been, after all. 

Kind is not nice. Aaron’s world will be defined by kindness and its absence. The world he lives in is about to be plunged into chaos, and it’ll all be his fault. He’s going to ruin lives, especially his own, and to say that the changes will be radical is a cosmic understatement. 

But he won’t go unopposed. There will be a real battle of wills and intellect, and who you support, whether you’re reading this on your phone at 3AM or in the morning with your breakfast, is going to say more about you than it does about the story. It is, after all, just a story, and you’re not. You’re just a person, after all. Your life isn’t planned out by some writer, nobody’s in control, and nothing is actually important. In the grand scheme of things, nothing any of us do even matters. We don’t matter. You don’t matter. 

Do you? 

Are you a nobody in an ocean of faces? A hero? 

A villain?

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