I like it when the bad guys win.
When I was young, there was never any good movies where the bad guy takes the dub. Kids shouldn't see that, right? In Disney movies, the bad guy might win a battle or two but never the war.
From an early age, the closest thing I found to a bad guy winning was the "Overlord" series from Triumph Studios. In "Overlord", you play as, well, the Overlord. You awaken from a long slumber by a hunch back minion named Gnarl whose method of getting you back on your feet is to rub acid in your eyes. What follows is a sometimes raucous romp through a once idyllic land infested with former heroes embodying the Seven Deadly Sins. These former heroes are terrible people, fallen from grace, and draining the land dry. So, maybe you're not all bad seeing as you're tasked with killing them. You can choose between treating your newly conquered lands with benevolence, while still being their Overlord, or you can pretty much just slap a "under new management" sign everywhere you go and continue the tyrannical grip the former heroes had on their realms.
The gameplay is very hack and slash. You utilize a variety of weapons and spells to become a force to be reckoned with. What made the game so unique were the minions. As you acquire news hives, the Overlord can come to control an army of 4 different types of imps each specializing in some type of brutality. Browns are you basic minions, made to smash your enemy and club them to death. Reds are ranged, spitting fireballs in their hands and chunking them at your foes. Greens are stealthy assassins that go invisible when placed on a rally point and will jump on any foe that comes close dealing massive damage with backstabs. Finally, blues are your healers and can swim. Place them in a rally point and they'll run over to any fallen minion (assuming they were smashed or exploded) and get them back in the fight.
While the series has slowly declined, with the so-so Overlord 2 and then the downright disrespectful Overlord: Fellowship of Evil (with other spinoffs in between). What does stay consistent, is the witty and entertaining writing of Rhianna Prachett, daughter of famous author Sir Terry Prachett. She brought life to Overlord and without her the series would never have gotten past the first one. British humor is unmatched.
Even though the gameplay is a blast, the concept of being the bad guy was still the most interesting thing about the game. Sometimes, it just feels good to be bad. It can be as simple as Overlord, where you go about doing as you please and smashing up the place, or it can have some more nuance.
Thanos was the big bad for the entirety of the the first phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but he wasn't wholly evil. Sort of. Marvel found its feet with "Iron Man" (though Tobey Maguire deserves a lot of thanks for the MCU in my opinion) and it lead up to "The Avengers" where we got our first look at Thanos in all his purple glory. Back then, and in subsequent movies, he was made out to be this angry force of evil that wanted all the Infinity Stones so he could snap away half the galaxy. He was more like the comic book version, who wanted to destroy half the universe just to impress Death. What a simp.
When we see him in Infinity War, he's completely different. Determined, sometimes cold, and downright bad to the bone but also... different. He's calm, calculated, and even sorry for what he is doing. When it is explained just why he is doing what he is doing, you can't help but emphasize with him. His world was destroyed by its own success, its beauty crumbled before his eyes because there was just so many of them and the planet couldn't take it. He's perpetrated war and death for years, all in the name of trying to make sure this doesn't happen to the rest of the galaxy. His adoptive daughters are made into assassins to fulfill this purpose, yet he shed a tear upon throwing Gamorrah off the cliff to get the soul stone and sure enough it accepted the sacrifice.
At this point, it was known a second movie was coming. You don't make a sequel like that unless something goes wrong. Of course, something did go wrong. Thanos won. I don't think I have ever felt more satisfied watching him sit down at the end with a thankful sigh escaping his chapped, purple lips as he reflects on his journey. In the beginning of the sequel, he's busy farming away the rest of his life and he couldn't care any less if he died. Which of course, he did. By a very sharp axe. Before his death, Thanos was proof a bad guy could be done well. There is of course more example in film, books, et cetera, but I'm focusing on Thanos. Being bad doesn't have to mean manically laughing and being cruel for the sake of being cruel. It can mean more.
Also, just imagine the stress the Avengers and co. were under facing down Thanos. If they failed, trillions were about to die. If Thanos failed, he died and everyone else moved on. The personal stakes for the Purple Titan were high but not for anybody else. Maybe there'd be more starvation? War? Who knows. At face value though, he loses and the good guys win. That's it. Everyone moves on. If the Avengers lose, so does everyone else except Thanos. There's a lot less stress being bad. Maybe that's why I want to play the bad guy more often. Its a lot easier being a tyrant than it is to stay awake at night worrying about money.
So, for just a moment, the bad guy won and I was satisfied.
Just as I was satisfied when I killed the final boss in Overlord and knew there wasn't a thing anybody could do to stop me now. It felt good to be bad. Its a power fantasy, like a fulfillment of the dark thoughts we all get from time to time, but there's less guilt playing a the bad guy in a video game. After all, it wasn't my idea to make me a tyrant. I had to be one. The video game said so.
That's what I want more of. To be clear, I'm not talking about occasionally picking the bad boy wannabe option in Mass Effect. I want to be bad.
Let me be Thanos on occasion. Give me a reason to be bad if you have too. Even the Overlord gives you some extra motivation. Yeah, you're bad, but you aren't as bad as the guys you just killed to claim their crown. But you could be, if you wanted.
For all our lives we're (hopefully) taught the difference between right and wrong and that's cool and all, but it makes it even more satisfying when we get to be bad. I want to be a conqueror, roving the land taking what I want and destroying what gets in my way. I want to be Sauron. Let me smash Frodo on a rock and cast him into Mt. Doom, sans ring of course. Besides that, being good all the time, as we know, is so stressful. What did Sauron stress over? Some little people with harry feet? I bet Frodo stressed more over being on a boat than Sauron ever did planning the conquest of Gondor.
Comments