Rooting for the Broken and the Damned.

In the past heroes, villains and victims had their own duty and each of them played their respective part in a story. Choosing a character to love, hate or pity was never a subject of discussion among the audience.

With time as the quality of narratives improved in screenwriting, characters were humanized, their complexities were captured in their truest, unfiltered form. Writers replaced cartoonish characters to real life humans with depth in characters and a collection of good, bad and ugly choices that shaped the character's storyline. This shift in narrative might be one of the greatest literary achievements, to judge a character as a whole rather than the part the story needs. Books have always been home to complex, real human characters but in screenwriting this was something new.

The writers in the cinematic and entertainment industry evolved gracefully and brilliantly, with wisdom of the history of complex characters that literature brought and the maturity of responsible members of the society whose duty it is to explore all sides of a character and show them on screen in their truest unbiased form, free of judgement. But the audience stayed stagnant or should I say deteriorated.

With the ease of accessibility of entertainment platforms and short form content, outrageous media platforms, the culture of literature died a slow painful death. What used to be a daily habit in all households, for people of all ages became a niche that was to be gate kept. Novels were written by unbiased authors who showed their characters for who they were human. Readers were also comfortable with the fact that characters make mistakes, they win some and lose some. Flaws make them human.

But short form media walked into the world like a storm without a prior warning, the entire generation flooded away with it, with almost no experience in reading classical literature. Their source of leisure was media on a phone screen and their idea of long form content was cinema or TV shows. The cultural shift was sudden and now the entire narrative was in the hands of media houses. The worst blow came when short form media took the winning lap over cinema (now long form content).

The characters that used to be judged after reading 600 pages of a novel turned to charcters being judges in 3 hours of cinematic experience which reduced to 15 seconds of media clip to judge a character. The depth of a character remained the same, but the time taken too make a perception or to receive and absorb the character reduced drastically. The narrative wasn't in the hands of the author anymore, it was too loosely coupled. Incidents from books / movies were taken out of context and the audience judged relentlessly it was always good or bad and never neutral, never real, the perception was never what the writer intended it to be.

To serve an audience with an attention span of 15 seconds, creators had no choice but to romanticize the choices of their characters. The moral compass was suddenly irrelevant, the immediate emotional appeal or the aesthetic of dialogues, actions, choices and looks is what the character was reduced to. Villains were aestheticized for their power, victims were romanticized for their almost poetic series of ill fate and circumstances and the heroes were neglected because their story would take longer than 15 seconds.

The shift was in perception but it also influenced future narratives. Since, media had become a commercial powerhouse whose main objective was to capitalize out of public sentiments unlike traditional classical literature where the goal was to simply observe, express and relate to people. The media houses rewrote their stories to simply adjust and capitalize to the current public sentiment, if the crowd was loving a character with morally grey choices, the cinematic universe flooded the market with similar stories, if the crowd raged against the injustice of a character, the next few years, we could only see stories of victims. The purpose of a story went from the ground reality of people to plastic characters that sell well.

The character and the basic spirit of Heroes, Villains and Victims can be broken down into spiritual, moral, intellectual and circumstantial factors. Each of them has been through changes in the past few years.

About Victims

An ideal definition for a victim would be someone who has faced a single or a series of ill fat events that were potentially life altering. Traditionally victims face a bad event and work their way out of it but in modern times, victim is being translated into a life long identity instead of a circumstance. The entire struggle or attempt to come out of or change the path of life is invisible in people's mind. Every future action is attributed to their ill fate. The audience has lost its ability to differentiate between events that are years apart. Does a single circumstance of ill fate give you the reason to forgive every incoming conscious ill choice of an individual? Is any circumstance that terrible that it gives you the right to blame that every single moment in the future?

Mahabharat the epic is a complete tale with all types of characters and story lines is the perfect case study to support the claim of shift in narratives. For the period of 2000s 2010s, picking any child or even adult in India and asking them their favourite character from Mahabharat would be a refreshing conversation starter. Everybody had unique affinity and inclinations to different characters they could relate to or inspire to be Arjun, Bhima, Bhishma, Karna, Dronacharya you had all kinds of answers and the public opinion felt natural, like the grand truth of distribution of personalities.

But the following decade, when a new Mahabharat series was released with whitewashed characters, a different narrative was set in. Every child loved Karna, and only Karna. The Star Plus show glorified him not just for his prowess but for his fate, framing him as a skilled prince bound to the villain's side by an eternal debt. The subtleties of his more questionable choices were suppressed, and the audience was left with a golden boy whose only fault was fate.

That was a narrative change, but a perception change is more serious. The rise in public affection for Franz Kafka is worth studying. Kafka has long been valued for capturing a deeply troubled soul and the quiet isolation many people feel. But social media has begun glorifying him instead for his love affairs, with out-of-context quotes from his letters circulating as though they were the height of romance.

Kafka's own letters describe a man who struggled with helplessness, hopelessness, and commitment, and who tended to push people away rather than draw them close. Reframing that as romantic ideal overlooks the real difficulty of his relationships. A 15-second attention span only has room for the out-of-context quote, not the fuller, more complicated picture.

People mistake pity for relatability or likeability or eventually glory. Have people lost their intellect to differentiate between the two or has the perception shifted to placing misfortune on the pedestal rather than merit? Is pity a better emotion than inspiration suddenly? Will this narrative and perception shift change storytelling forever? Are we going to stop having characters who inspired us to be a better version of ourselves? A victim's journey to survivor has been completely suppressed.

About Villains

Humanizing the choices of a morally decayed character is my personal favourite genre. But the surge in idolizing power over the moral compass must be studied. The world has been broken so many times that it's people cannot believe absolute power can be achieved by purity or morals or simply upholding the moral values, basic kindness that we are born with.

Be it stories or politicians, wherever there is infamy, there is scepticism among people, the thought of "How many rules did they have to break?" before they could reach the throne never ceases to echo in their mind. This corrupt system of power in the world is running on the fuel of immorality and it is quietly dehumanizing people, the very thing that made us humans was love and kindness and now that doesn't attract the audience anymore.

Power and villains go hand in hand, call it the origin story, nobody criticizes it. They simply accept it as the only remaining option in the quest for power. This world has completely rejected the concept of being powerful and kind, moral at the same time. A person being pure spirited and powerful feels like a figment of imagination but somehow brutal villains are more relatable.

In recent times, there has been a wave of appraisal for India's famous established villain Raavan from Ramayana. A character who was born from scholarly lineage, religious, spiritual, all time powerful but still morally decayed. He was the ultimate example of cruelty, the exhibit to prove that righteousness always triumphs over arrogance. The current public perception has given food to the thought of dissecting Raavan into compartments Knowledge, Spirituality, and the rest of it. A man is the sum of his choices, that is what makes it hard for one mortal to be judged by another. You are the worst choice you made.

In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, we have the darkest protagonist Raskolnikov who commits ruthless crime just to satisfy his theory of "Intelligent people are above the law". While the theory does sound romantic, and disgustingly creative, it does not cancel out the fact that crimes were committed. Yet people love him for his eccentricity and his bravery. On the contrary, the most disgusting character in the book Svidrigailov is still hated for very similar crimes and mentality, because he did not have a colossal theory to save him.

The difference between Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov is not the weight of their sins, it is the elegance of their justification. Give a villain a philosophy, an ideology, a tragic childhood, or a well written monologue, and the audience will forgive almost anything. Deny him that same articulation and he becomes simply repulsive, no matter how similar his choices were. Villainy, it seems, is no longer judged by what was done, but by how well it was explained.

About Heroes

Hero as a concept stood for meritocracy, ambition and excellence. They represented discipline and rigor to break through a world that couldn't contain them while upholding their moral compass. The hero suffers today precisely because he refuses to be compartmentalized. He cannot be reduced to a single aesthetic, a single wound, or a single quote, because his defining trait is consistency, and consistency does not survive a 15 second clip. A villain's one great line can be extracted and worshipped, a victim's one tragic moment can be extracted and mourned, but a hero's worth is only visible across the full arc of his restraint, his discipline, and the choices he did not make. That arc cannot be compressed, and so it is simply skipped.

If everyone wants to see characters similar to who they are, then what happens to the characters they could have been?