The tendency to empathize with the villain goes back to the very first villain of all: Lucifer. The concept at the center here being that morality is holding us back from something we need or something important. I'm not saying you're a Satanist if you think the villain of a given story is cool (after all human creators are flawed and are not literally God so they obviously couldn't devise a perfectly convincing "Satan"), but the interactions in fiction mimic those of our actual world as well. The appeal of Lucifer's story is the burning desire for independence. It doesn't matter that God's plans are perfect
if it means having to be SERVILE to an external god. That sacrifice, from the perspective of the Lucifer-sympathizer, can never truly be worth it. The allure is in Lucifer wanting to BE God rather than serve below him.
Quote:How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
to the depths of the pit.
Those who see you stare at you,
they ponder your fate:
“Is this the man who shook the earth
and made kingdoms tremble,
the man who made the world a wilderness,
who overthrew its cities
and would not let his captives go home?”
The Independent Adversary versus Hero who Walks the Path of Destiny is so deeply in-grained that most stories take on this dichotomy quite possibly even without intending to. And when you have a disordered mind, and a disordered entertainment / media canon, the hero maintains his servile quality in service of terrible and unconvincing values. In the end, it makes him seem like a doofus, or a cuckhold, or a loser, for sacrificing himself, his usually exatraordinary abilities and spirit and mind, for something hideous and degrading. I have personally always identified with the "good side" by default. Retribution Paladin was my main class and spec of choice in WoW.
In situations like Harry Potter, I rejected the story entitely because of its unconvincing heroes. There are a number of stories where the villains always seem better because the author's own values play into the story and make the heroes defend them indirectly. As pointed out by Mikka, what Harry Potter and the good guys of Hogwarts fight for is basically stupid. They aren't powerful, they get shoved around and maligned by the non-magical world so their lifestyle can't truly be said to be celebration of magic and those with this special gift. They fight to relegate themselves to irrelevance and replacement. This makes them seem rather pathetic. And other factors reveal this too. Harry starts life as an abused child. His adversity is a result of being stepped on and treated with inferiority. The "proper" model of this is that the Hero who Walks the Path of Destiny is an enemy to the world itself. That's a more convincing source of adversity and alienation for him. Of course, Rowling is a progressive feminist so the idea of a meek boy who is being raped by his cruel surroundings being given special powers is part of her own worldview. I didn't watch anything after the 2nd or 3rd movie, because by then I already hated Harry Potter, but my guess he really does not have much of any real struggles with being an enemy of the world. He seems like the type of character who is effrctively incapable of doing anything hurtful to characters who aren't the singled-out, designated villains of the story. Moses returned to see people worshipping an idol, and as a result he had to kill every single last one of them. I don't think Harry Potter could do this. If faced with such a scenario, he would defect to the side of evil. God commanding the sacrifice of Isaac also serves as a good example.
In the above quote, there is a different model, which is to align good directly with good. That you can defect from "service" to the good in favor of making your own, evil world of your design. But because you are not the true creator of anything, your options are limited. The more you defect the more what you create is aligned with death itself. Decay itself. Decline. You can have the freedom from being a servant if you are okay with declining into dust and fading away gracelessly. It makes the stakes for good and evil more clear in a way many stories do not. Especially those from people who don't believe this, even those who are proposing a new model for good and evil. Many heroes in stories made by these people fight for nothing. In Nu-Wars Luke has become a pathetic figure. Rey only really fights for some neutrality, to get rid of the villain by turning him to the side of good. In this regard the "evil side" simply has the entire claim towards the concept of transcendence. Most stories written by progs, the heroes don't fight to transcend, but to remain or preserve. The story ends when things "go back to normal". This is not at all like Exodus or the ongoing story of the Bible. That is the story of huamanity transcending at
all costs. "Biblical" as an adjective exists as a result of how much sheer destruction and transformation comes directly out of this proposition, the innately upsetting things we must do to reach heaven. But for people who don't believe in that at all, the thing the heroes fight for will be substituted by what the author themself values. Which in most cases for the libtard era is a type of conformity. Ironic, because the libtards ARE the satanists, and this reveals something about the character of Luciferianism.
Which reminds me of the Spacetime / Terence McKenna collaboration I listened to recently. McKenna is not shy about opposing seemingly good things like monogamy and Christianity out right. And he doesn't call his machine elves demons, but I think on some level he is making the conscious choice for evil. The elves (more like gnomes, in reality, as he described them as "tikes" and says theh have the heads of basketballs) tell him they love him and begin singing objects into existence, and they tell him he can do this to and he should do it now. Seemingly this is the impetus for his life's work. What's notable is he believes in a transcendence of his making, of casting off all ideology and exclusivity to return to "the mushroom-covered plains of Africa 15,000 years ago". This is something that is proposed as a species-wide shift...there is no heaven and no hell, there is no seperation of wheat from chaff. All Luciferian plans are fundamentally poptimist and populist. If we can just deconstruct the imposed goodness from outside sufficiently, we return to the blank slate of humanity which is the ultimate good because warfare, monotheism and monogamy are defeated. I would argue this is precisely why people have a much greater tendency to sympathize with villains in post-progressive stories. I have never encountered a "Sauron Defender" in my entire life. Somehow such a story has retained enough of the proper model of good versus evil that people don't even feel the need to justify the villain. The progessives have an alternative, inherently Luciferian model, yet excised from basically its entire appeal. Luciferianism's anti-appeal is the affinity for decline and validating the masses rather than rebuking them. Yet the villains of progressive era stories shed this quality. They are men against history who are fighting for something real, something SINGULAR, they are shoe-ins for MONOTHEISM. By contrast, the heroes just fight for the masses and their desire to remain eternally stagnant. It would be interesting to see some kind of self-aware libtard write a story from this perspective, sort of a libtard doomer who believes fascism will always win regardless of if its right or not. In fact maybe some of these stories have that quality and that maintains people's interest in them.
