For hypothetical example; Father/son duo are criminals, harming, killing, and stealing innocent civilians. Superhero fights them, resulting in the father dying. Son is now portrayed as a sympathetic villain because all he wants is to avenge his father… despite all the fathers of children they murdered whilst comitting crimes.
Side question; do you feel sympathy for the villains portrayed like this?
It doesn’t only bother me for villains, I just had villains in particular on the mind. I get it though. I was just watching TV and Aquaman came on and I’ve seen a bunch of other superho movies on TV lately, so I was just thinking a lot about the tropes I see a lot, and that particular example was at the front of my mind.
I’d also recently scene Age of Ultron, where the twins had, in my opinion, a really questionable reason for siding with Ultron.
I also love writing fiction myself, and I have a terrible habit of disecting just about every plot point I encounter in media to see what “makes them work”, or not work, to see what I can learn from them for my own writing. Makes me awful overly critical of some things.
Villains must be tricky. It’s hard to make evil motivations relatable to most people. (who I’m assuming are good people)
We really want to believe that some horrific event caused the downfall of this person, but sometimes “I just wanted to see if I could” is a legitimate, although unsatisfying, evil reason to do something.