I Want To Talk About Real Life Villains

i want to talk about real life villains

Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.

Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.

I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"

I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.

And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.

He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.

John Hammond.

probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.

If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.

book spoilers below.

In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.

He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.

In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.

THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.

I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.

In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.

I think it is really important to see and understand this kind of villainy in fiction, so you can recognize it in real life.

Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.

And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.

I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.

Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.

can we ask about ur family's curse

according to my great grandma it was cast on her grandma by a neighbor with the evil eye - "your daughters will marry their fathers and your sons will become them"

which is really just a fancy way of describing the cycle of abuse and therefore worked very well, generally going into effect before the kid in question turned 21

so my matrilineal family tree winds up a fractured, miserable mess, lots of young marriages and parents falling apart generation after generation, serial toxic marriages with generations of kids scattered across the whole state in foster homes - very nasty stuff

until it gets to me (firstborn in my generation of cousins) and by the time im twenty one i am 1. both daughter and son and neither 2. extremely aspec and queer

which apparently this neighbor did not conceive of when casting her eye and seems to have simply error messaged the curse into oblivion. no one born after me has had this problem. all their romantic relationships are loving (though i would never claim them perfect) and their children adored. fairytale loopholed so hard the damn thing disintegrated. its the funniest magic story i have lmao

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

If Thomas Wayne was a surgeon then that means that he wasn't running wayne enterprises while alive. So I present to you: Martha wayne took over the company.

Young Thomas Wayne meets Martha Kane at a gala and they become fast friends. Martha is smart and cunning, business savy, more than Thomas was. So he convinces her to go to business school (rather scandalous for the time- assuming it's the late 40's) while they are in school and Thomas is going through medical school the two fall in love and by the time Martha graduates they decided to get married and Martha Kane is now Martha Wayne. Shortly after Thomas graduates his father decides that he can no longer run WE and Thomas, being an only child is troubled. He didn't want to run the company and honestly hadn't thought of what to do when his father stepped down. Lucky he had a brilliant beautiful, and did he say brilliant wife who just so happend to go to business school.

: ) I regect model Martha wayne because that's boring, CEO Martha wayne who was simply a fashion icon and often on the cover of magazines is better (nothing wrong with model Martha but I want Martha to be more than Bruce's mom)

I love the idea of Alfred being in a relationship with Martha and Thomas. Bruce grows up hearing about how "your parents were the sweetest people I have ever met, Master Bruce. I look at you and see their best qualities." Bruce sneaks out of bed and sees Alfred standing in the hallway, his head pressed against a painting of his parents, silently crying. Alfred brings up his parents at every opportunity, without even realising it. "I thought we could go out today, Master Bruce. Your father always wanted to take you ice skating, he thought it was very fun. Where is your scarf, dear boy?" When Bruce realises the way he feels about his male classmates is the same as his female ones, he goes to Alfred and cries when he is hugged and cradled and comforted. He wonders how his parents would feel, and Alfred banishes all the bad ideas. "Nonsense. Your mother was incredibly supportive. She would want you to love whoever you wanted."

It's only decade later, after adopting a billion children, that Tim comes out. He is bisexual, and he has two boyfriends, and he is proud of himself and- "Ah, a man after my own heart. Martha and Thomas would be so happy to see how the world has changed."

shocked. astounded. dumbfounded.

"THAT'S WHY YOU COULDNT BABYSIT ME WHEN THEY HAD DATE NIGHTS?!"

Wow!!!