Many modern stories tend to give villains sympathetic backstories, and with that, the popular opinion that “villains should just be villains” has been taking online spaces by storm. I disagree with the basis of this claim.

To put it simply, villains with sympathetic backstories aren’t inherently not villains anymore. A lot of the time, their backstory serves to explain what happened, not justify what the villain had done.

While this isn’t always the case, people will still argue that the villain was stripped of their villainy just because they have a sympathetic story. This argument can be short-sighted.

For example, many people accuse White Lily Cookie from “Cookie Run” of this fault. The narrative, however, shows that her backstory is how she wound up the way she did. In fact, the narrative downright emphasizes that despite her past, she is not inherently deserving of forgiveness for her acts.

It all really comes down to a lack of critical thinking, but not thinking too deeply about something like that isn’t immediately a terrible thing. I can see how people come to the conclusion that they do, especially with villain-loving being on the rise.

These two issues do overlap, actually. Sometimes, people fail to realize that liking a character does not mean you endorse their actions. If a sympathetic backstory makes you like the villain, that doesn’t mean you agree with their actions, right?

It’s a tricky thing to get a grasp on, sometimes, and that’s okay, but one must learn to think critically about what they’re seeing. Lots of characters are multifaceted even if they are bad people.