Not excusing, necessarily. I'm not out here filing public relations paperwork for every fictional war criminal with good cheekbones. But I am interested in them. Deeply, consistently, almost suspiciously interested in them. And over time I’ve had to admit that this is not just a taste issue. It’s not just me enjoying complexity, or loving messy characters, or being seduced by charisma and narrative tension, though all of that is true. A lot of Nexus Therapy has made it painfully clear that my reflexive compassion for the characters everyone else writes off is rooted in my C-PTSD.
Which is, frankly, rude.
I would love for this to be a cooler story. I would love to say I simply have a refined appreciation for morally complicated narratives and leave it at that, maybe toss my hair a little and act mysterious. But no. The truth is much less glamorous and much more deeply wired. When you grow up in an environment where danger, volatility, unpredictability, and emotional distortion are familiar, you get very good at reading people beneath the surface. You learn that the loudest behavior is not always the whole story. You learn that cruelty often has roots. You learn that damage leaks. You learn that the person everyone else calls monstrous may, in fact, be acting from a wound they do not know how to live with. That does not make the harm okay, and it does not magically redeem every terrible thing a person does, fictional or otherwise. But it does mean my brain has never been especially satisfied with easy labels. I do not look at a villain and see a category. I see a pattern, a fracture, a survival strategy that grew teeth.
That is the part I understand.
A shitty childhood teaches you to scan. It teaches you to listen for the shift in tone, the pause that means trouble, the edge under the smile, the mismatch between what someone says and what they mean. It teaches you that people are rarely just one thing. That sometimes the ugliest behavior in the room is coming from the most broken nervous system. Again, that is not a free pass. I cannot stress that enough before anyone starts twitching. Understanding is not the same as endorsement. Compassion is not absolution. But trauma can make you exquisitely sensitive to the machinery behind behavior, and once you start seeing that machinery, it is hard to go back to the cartoon version of good guys and bad guys. I don't trust clean moral packaging. I never have. I am always looking under it for the rot, the grief, the humiliation, the fear, the old wound someone built an empire around because they never learned another way to survive.
And villains, the good ones anyway, are usually made of that.
I think part of it is that villains are often carrying things more openly than heroes are allowed to. Heroes get to be noble, relatable, aspirational. Villains get to be excessive. They get to be angry, petty, obsessive, uncontained, hungry in ways polite society hates. They get to want too much. They get to be warped by pain without hiding it under a neat little self-improvement arc. There's something brutally honest about that. Sometimes the villain is the only person in the story who is not pretending their damage made them nicer. Sometimes they're the only one whose suffering has not been cleaned up for audience comfort. And for someone with trauma, that can hit a nerve. Because trauma is not always pretty. Survival is not always noble. Sometimes what keeps you alive also makes you difficult, secretive, intense, defensive, controlling, reactive, impossible to love in tidy ways. Villains often embody the parts of human brokenness that people would rather exile than examine, and I've spent enough of my life dealing with exile, internal and otherwise, to know I am always going to look twice at the person standing in that space.
Also, if I'm being honest, I know what it is like to be misread.
Not as a villain, hopefully. Let’s not get carried away. But as too much. Too intense. Too sharp. Too guarded. Too complicated. Too difficult to fit neatly into a version of personhood that makes everyone else comfortable. Trauma does that too. It creates layers, contradictions, and reflexes that do not always present well. It can make you defensive before anyone attacks, distrustful before anyone betrays you, emotionally armed before anyone has even entered the room. And when I see characters carrying that same kind of distortion, that same sense of being shaped by something relentless and then judged for the shape it left behind, I respond. My first instinct is not, “What’s wrong with them?” It is, “What happened to them?” That question has probably defined half my reading life.
It is also why villains so often feel more alive to me than heroes do.
Heroes are frequently written to be understood. Villains have to be decoded. There is texture in that. There is tension. There is room to wonder where the break happened, where the need curdled into cruelty, where the fear got turned outward. My brain loves that terrain because it is familiar terrain. C-PTSD trains you to become an archivist of emotional undercurrents. You get good at reading what is not being said, what is being covered, what is being displaced, what old injury is wearing this new face. So of course I am drawn to the villain. The villain is often the loudest expression of hidden damage in the room. The villain is what happens when pain gets theatrical. The villain is what happens when survival mutates into control, when loneliness mutates into possession, when fear puts on a beautiful coat and starts calling itself power. How am I not supposed to find that interesting?
And yes, sometimes I am also just shallow enough to enjoy a dangerous fictional person with a compelling voice and a catastrophic emotional interior. I contain multitudes.
But the deeper truth is that my empathy does not begin where other people’s approval begins. It rarely has. I have never needed a character to be easy to love in order to care about them. In fact, I often trust my own response more when it goes toward the characters everyone else rejects. That usually tells me there is something there worth looking at. Not because the crowd is always wrong, but because collective hatred has a way of flattening complexity. Once a character becomes the designated object of disgust, people stop being curious. They stop asking interesting questions. They stop noticing the seams. And curiosity, for me, is almost always where compassion begins. I want to know what made them. I want to know what they are protecting. I want to know what they are still trying to outrun. I want to know who they were before the story named them a monster and whether that person is still in there somewhere, half-buried and furious.
That is probably the C-PTSD too.
When you have spent enough time trying to understand people who could hurt you, sometimes empathy becomes less of a virtue and more of a reflex. You do not choose it. It just happens before judgment gets there. You feel for the broken thing first. You register the wound before the weapon. This is not always a great life skill, to be clear. In real life it can get messy fast. It can make you over-identify, overextend, hand out compassion to people who have done absolutely nothing to earn access to it. It can blur lines that should stay bright and visible. Trauma responses are rarely elegant. But in fiction, at least, it gives me a strange kind of x-ray vision. I see the pain structure under the performance. I see the child under the cruelty. I see the need under the manipulation. I see the terror buried in the control. And once I see it, I cannot unsee it.
One of the things I have had to make peace with is the fact that surviving pain does not automatically make you gentle. Sometimes it makes you dangerous. Sometimes it makes you brilliant and terrible. Sometimes it makes you the kind of person people avoid for very good reasons. That is uncomfortable to admit, but discomfort is where most honest character work begins.
And honest character work is always going to pull me toward the villain.
Villains are rarely comfortable. They are often alarming. They are sometimes reprehensible. But they are also, more often than not, the characters carrying the rawest truths about what pain can do when it is left to fester, perform, seduce, and calcify. My C-PTSD may be the reason I see that so quickly, the reason my empathy gets there before my judgment does, the reason I keep reaching toward the character everyone else has already condemned. It may not be the healthiest origin story, but it is an honest one. And if I have learned anything from spending this much time in my own head, it is that honesty is almost always more interesting than virtue.
So yes, the villain is usually my first pick. Not because I am trying to be contrary. Not because I think evil is glamorous. But because I know damage when I see it, and I know how often the world confuses damaged people with disposable ones. Fiction gives me room to look longer. To ask harder questions. To feel compassion without handing over my common sense. And maybe that is the real answer. I do not love villains because I am blind to what they do. I love them because I am not. I see the wound and the wreckage. I see the harm and the history. I see exactly why everyone else hates them, and I still cannot stop wondering who they were before the world, or their own choices, turned them into someone easy to condemn.