Thinking Too Much: Life Lessons From Supervillains

 
In which our writer Dan way, way over-intellectualizes modern popular culture. The degree to which any of this is tongue in cheek is known only to him.

 
Have you ever noticed how most villains are terrible at their jobs? This came up fairly recently in the Geek-Life household when Tiarra went on a binge to catch up on Merlin. When seeing several episodes back-to-back, one thing I noticed immediately is that in basically every episode of the season, the villainous Morgana announces she “knows exactly how to bring Arthur down” or some variation thereupon, and yet her schemes fail fairly consistently. If she didn’t, of course, the entire premise of the show would fall apart… after all, Arthur goes on to be King Arthur and Merlin goes on to be Merlin. We the audience know this. It’s the same way that they could do any big dramatic status quo changes on Smallville without undoing them later, because we know Clark becomes Superman and Lex becomes Lex Luthor and they fight and stuff. This has been going on in these stories since time immemorial. And yet… how do these villains keep going? How does Snidely Whiplash get out of bed in the morning, to concoct yet another scheme. I mean, anybody who ties damsels to train tracks has to have some issues going on, but to maintain that level of personal confidence after a consistent and ongoing series of similar setbacks is pretty impressive.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but of course that’s silly. (If you still worry about getting hit by cars when crossing the street, even though that’s never happened to you before, does that make you insane?) Maybe we’re the insane ones. After all, the Joker seems happy. He doesn’t tie his own personal sense of self-worth to the success ratio of his various projects. If Batman wants to be super-competitive, let him. The Joker gets pleasure out of simple, everyday things like beating up sidekicks with a crowbar.

Then there are the exceptions, like Dr. Doom, who, even if he keeps losing to the Fantastic Four and the rest of the Marvel Universe, still gets to be dictator of a whole country, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Perhaps that’s the key, to make sure that even when things go wrong, we hold on to the things that we do have. The Mayor on Buffy may not have gotten to turn into a giant snake and eat everybody like he wanted, but, hey, he still had root beer and miniature golf. If you hold onto the fact that you would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids, it’s bound to get to you.

Which is what makes me think villains are just better adjusted than the rest of us. I mean, if I were one of the people Scooby Doo and his pals found out over the years, after all that hard work to make a scary costume and go around pretending to haunt people to achieve my ends, I would have a pretty big grudge afterwards. And after I got out of prison, I would go back and find Velma, Fred, et al and ruin their lives the way they ruined mine. Because if they had a shred of decency they wouldn’t have snitched on me to the cops. They deserve to suffer…

But no ex-Cons have appeared to try and somehow ruin Daphne’s chances of ever getting into college, and I think the reason for that is that villains, though they all have their origin stories, are generally at peace with their roles. And having one idea go wrong after another isn’t merely the plight of the bad guy. It’s the plight of most of us in the universe. The difference with villains is that they don’t accept a “normal” life, they aren’t beaten down into working customer service jobs and wearing a name-tag. They go big or go home, and when told repeatedly to go home they keep going big. I think we could all stand to learn a lot from villains.