It's very common nowadays to give your villain a bit more depth and motivation than simple lust for power. Something that even us, regular folks, might agree with - might even do the same he did, were we in his shoes. Or that's the idea.



I almost always end up hating it.

I get where you're coming from. You're trying to show that things aren't so black and white - that bad guys are human too, capable of love and compassion rather than just being a bunch of absolutely-evil punching-bags. And there's nothing wrong with wanting that. But this sort of a thing is so rarely thought fully through, and nearly always falls flat for three reasons.

First, they don't end up looking like any more three-dimensional human beings, at least for me. They just end up as absolute hypocritical myopic douchenuggets - even worse than how they would otherwise have been. Nothing else matters in the world except their pain. Again, nothing wrong with that as such - if it were ever addressed, and if it weren't so bloody common to the point of a cliché. How is it that none of these people ever stopped to think about what they were doing? How can every single one of them, even the otherwise smart diabolical masterminds, be so utterly narrow-sighted? It's just implausible.

Second, it so rarely has any real plot impact, apart from giving them a reason to do what they do. It all ends in a great big epic slugfest no matter what. They get beaten up and nobody learns anything. I feel like they could easily add a scene of some moral complexity and an epiphany where it actually hits them, or maybe the good guys get through them with a good talk, but, again, all too rare.



Thirdly... have you seen some of the people we have in the real world? Some of the politicians, the corporate executives, the serial killers? If we demand our fictional villains to be three-dimensional and on some level sympathetic, then does that not make them more sympathetic than the real people? Or do you suppose Jair Bolsonaro is torching down the Amazon because it killed his mother, and every time he sees a tree he feels a tug of immense grief in his chest, and requires some time to himself to cry it out?

Hell, maybe some of them do. But that raises another question, some food for thought: we really hate these people. We live in an age with an unprecedented and festering political rift, where anyone on the opposite side is vilified as an inhuman and unrepentant monster that deserves nothing but death. But what if they were just people, same as us, with their own feelings and secret motivations? Shouldn't that mean that we should stop hating them and instead try to build a better future together?

Or maybe they really are just a bunch of monsters, in which case, don't you think the fiction and stories should be allowed to portray such evil as well?

I don't know. Whichever one we choose, I think we can do way better than we do - be it in the real world, or with our entertainment.