Firstly: I've been on kind of a serial adding rampage, so hello new people, welcome to my hell :D I don't have an intro post or anything, but it's a
livejournal, you know how this works. Also,
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
shogunate, I was going to comment something about my deep secret love of Tokugawa Japan and how this relates to your new username, but it said I was banned from commenting? Which might be a good idea, really, I'm just not sure how intentional it was!
Moving right along with that
Top 5 Meme, here are my
Top Five Ridiculous RPG Outfits as requested by
in_solis. The number one is
kind of obvious, but really, there can be only one.
( Top Five Ridiculous RPG Outfits )On a slightly more serious note, I was really busy last afternoon not studying for an exam, and so I found myself at
TVTropes in the vicinity of the
Valkyrie Profile. Somewhere around
Misaimed Fandom I stumbled upon this little gem:
Lezard Valeth from Valkyrie Profile was written to be as repulsive as possible, a sexually deviant stalker and violator of natural laws; like Harry Potter grown up terribly, terribly wrong. Some fans eat his character up, and pair him with the heroine of the first game.
Now, as someone with this icon, I think it's pretty obvious that Tri-Ace intended Lezard to be a popular character-- after all, he's a super-special Seraphic Gate party member, with his partners in badass Freya and Brahams. His lechery is played for humor as much as it is for creepiness, and he is a genuinely brilliant free agent in a world overly concerned with destiny. Lezard also has an entire series of official manga to his credit, as well as a prominent role in
Valkyrie Profile 2, which may has well have been subtitled Lezard for all Silmeria showed up in that thing. Yes, he is a horrible, horrible person-- but horrible people? In
my Valkyrie Profile? When did
that one happen?
But it did get me thinking: how
does one fangirl evil? I love Lezard because he's such a fascinating character, because in a game full of gods his motivations are supremely
human, in a game full of the dead he remains so triumphantly
alive. To love, to aspire-- these are passionate, red things, things the gods do not do with any vibrancy, and watching Lezard's quest for knowledge and kindness unmake him is weirdly poignant. His actions are pretty reprehensible, but his worth as character isn't the same as his worth as a person.
Still, I have to admit the appeal of fictional evil. The characters I like in books are almost never the characters I like in life, and vice versa. I don't think this is so unusual; even the good guys can be too brightly colored and brooding to tolerate for periods of more than thirty minutes per week plus commercial breaks.
And yet, the love of villains is so often accompanied by a desire to
change them, to make them better. We give them happy endings instead of downfalls. Does erasing fictional sins cheapen the real ones? Probably, eventually, if you decide that Satan is really the hero of
Paradise Lost or make Tom Riddle your private pink squishy bear. At the very least, it's hard to make Sephiroth the good guy without insulting Aeris. But more than that, really, by writing off a character's faults we make them less than what they are, not more. I'm not sure what to do with the moral question, or the question of authorial intent versus popular interpretation, but if you take away the worst parts of a character, you usually take away the most interesting.
