BW’s Saturday Article Link> Evil Has Become Good

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. —Isaiah 5:20 NIV

In a fictional sense that’s what we’re getting, as the villains of fiction are just given sympathetic backstories anymore. Their tales are being rewritten entirely so that the Wicked Witch, Maleficent, and Cruella DeVille (a name that speaks to her role in the story) are only some of the characters who were actually the heroes all along and the heroes are actually evil. It’s a form of propaganda I haven’t seen since a small group of Transformers fans back in my newsgroup days insisted the Decepticons were the actual heroes and the stories we grew up with were propaganda. Yes, this actually happened and I don’t know how serious…most of them were. One I know was way too serious, but that’s another conversation.

The Literature Devil, usually known for videos and his Morning Nonsense podcast, has started a Substack version of his old The First Edition YouTube channel and for his second article he looks at Maleficent and Elphaba specifically and how their stories compare with a fallen to darkness take on the wicked Queen from Snow White in the retexualized fairy tale series Once Upon A Time. In the article he goes over how you can have a villain fall to darkness and still be the villain while seeing the tragic events that corrupted him or her. There’s a difference between the fallen character and just changing the entire story. Plus, as I’ve gone over before while defending pure evil characters, villains serve a role in the narrative and taking them out of that role ruins the story.