The Villain Can Have Me

Considering how popular dark romance has been lately, or well how loudly popular dark romance has been lately, preferring the villain isn't new. I'm no different, I'll always love a "good" villain. I recently had one of my best friends look at me while we were rewatching The Walking Dead and ask me "Did you like Negan from the beginning or further into his character arc?" I grinned at her, taking my eyes off Rick, shuffling up to the "Don't Open, Dead Inside" door. "Oh! I liked him from the beginning!"

"Noooo!" she lamented, even as she laughed about it. My favorite character had killed her favorite character, thereby destroying her favorite couple.

Still, I played it up and cupped my face and fawned, telling her, "But he was the coolest villain! He had the coolest weapon! He ran an entire society!" I pointed dramatically at the screen insisting, "Rick ruined everything!"

We laughed, and went back to the show, but honestly, Negan wasn't the first villain I loved. Far from it. I wasn't even a teenager yet when I liked my first villain. I was six, maybe seven. It was Jareth from The Labyrinth because while he is very beloved, he is still the villain of the story. Something I perhaps didn't really catch onto until I was a little older, that typically there is always a bad guy. Jareth is it in the Labyrinth, but I liked him the best anyway. It might have been that I'd had a good relationship with my sibling. That I believed my older brother would never wish me away, and Sarah, in all her teenage huffing and puffing, got what she deserved, having to fix her mistakes herself. Her baby brother had a great time in the castle with The Goblin King after all, and really it all worked out in the end.

Isn't that what we're all waiting for?

For it all to work out?

By the time I was a teenager, disillusioned with my parents who would and will never stop gambling, I was firmly in camp anti-hero/villain. I was enamored with characters like Spike from Buffy, Alucard from Hellsing, Riddick from Pitch Black, and Hannibal Lecter who needs no introduction. They were all definitely too old for my teenage crushes. Actually, I don't know that I had many age appropriate crushes when I was younger, but thankfully no one was paying me any mind when I was a teenager. My parents included, maybe not thankfully in that case, they essentially flirted with the line marking my neglect, depending on how entrenched in their addiction they were. I love my parents and there were times where everything was good. Still, they, on multiple occasions, let the electricity go out in the dead of summer so they could gamble just a little more... until it was all gone. They left me home alone, knowing there was no food I was capable of cooking. They didn't exactly teach me how to cook frozen hamburger or chicken, but did instill a deep worry that if I tried, I'd ruin it, and waste all that food, and probably burn the apartment down while I was at it. Worse, they would come crying to me, their thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, however old I was-year-old about how we were going to be homeless, they spent all the money, and they didn't know what they were going to do. Looking at me like I had answers.

What was I supposed to do?

Why weren't they protecting me?

Don't worry, it didn't matter. They figured it out. We were never homeless. In fact, I remember after doing that once they took me to Disneyland, but it was hung over my head that it was a possibility.

I longed for someone who had at least a little control over their lives. Hell, they could have control of mine. Villains very much always seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Villains, if nothing else, had a plan. It seemed like heroes were getting by on luck to me, and I wasn't especially lucky in life. No one was hurting me, but no one was helping me either.

At the same time, my brother moved in and out a couple of times while I was a teen, and every time he left, I felt just a little more abandoned each time. Sure, I had friends, but they were living their own turbulent lives. I saw my friends a lot, but I wasn't exactly the main character of the friend group. I was barely a side character. It all just led to me feeling just that much closer to the characters in the shows I watched, the books I read, and especially the stories I wrote. I was camp lesser of two evils because the people who were supposed to take care of me, people who were supposed to be my heroes, left me alone more than they ever saw me, and you know what I learned? Villains never leave their obsessions alone.

I fantasized about running away. I still do at thirty-three, as the only person in my family that doesn't play screw around and find out with their money. I knew then I couldn't run away, and I know I can't now either. I have too many responsibilities. I'm keeping too many balls in the air and not everything I'm juggling is mine, but if some handsome villain kidnapped me, well, there would just be nothing I could do about that. Actually, when I first started writing my own stories, I very much loved a good kidnapping trope. Here's the thing though: the good guy doesn't go around snatching people up off the street, taking girls from their boring little lives. Shame. You know who does? The villain, and as far as I'm concerned, in this fictional situation I've thought up for myself, they can have me.

It can always get worse. It can always start raining, and don't you forget it. Then there's a villain for your villain. I'm sure I wasn't the first, how many can really be the first anymore when it comes to writing, but I had a character compare evil to beauty. "Just like beauty, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and you can’t find the evil you know that evil if you’re willing to stay." Ideally I would be willing to stay.

That's what writing does for you, gives you a chance to have that ideal.

There's those who whose ideal story would be a knight in shining armor. Some prince with a dazzling personality that just solves problems with a warm smile and their words. There's those who have dreamed about it since they were a child, and I don't knock them for wanting someone soft and kind. Get your happiness where you can, but even as a kid, my dreams weren’t terribly nice. Now that I’m older, I think even just dreaming it, I’d kind of resent that prince after spending all this time struggling. I spent, spend, days alone, and nights being chased by wolves my brain has conjured for me. Then I'm supposed to swoon for some guy who shows up not knowing a blessed thing about how hard everything I've been through was? That's bull. That’s not just bull, it’s bad story telling for him to show up and his mere existence makes it all better. Think the end of the Snow White. That boy showed up, kissed a sleeping girl, and that was it. That isn't an ending, it's a copout because you ran out of runtime. At this point, I've spent more meaningful time with the wolves hunting me.

I'll take the villain any day.

They're going to do something about your problems. Those problems are not going to be your problems anymore because the villain is going to deal with them. They're probably going to choose violence. Realistically, do I want violence? No. More often than not, I cry when people yell at me. I'm not made for violence.

In my fiction?

Yes.

Choose me over the world. No one else is going to. I'm not a hero. No one is sending me to defeat the villain. I have the kind of "luck" that they'd find me. If the few friends I do have are any indication, I'm the kind of unintentionally endearing that I end up adopted by any extrovert willing to talk for me. I'm willing for my fictional extroverts to order my tea and do crime.

After all, at this point, I've made the villains into the heroes in my mind. They're better at it, and no one can tell me otherwise.

So, just like I said for the people who like the prince. Get your happiness where you can and if it's in the pages of that dark romance book, you go for it.

I am.