Villain in an Age of Anti-villains

by David Johnston 

Iâd be crazy to think Kefka or X-Death a superior villain to Sephiroth. Who wouldnât love one of those ãthe world done me wrongä, good-old-boy-gone-bad types, whom we can all relate to? Me. I loathe, abhor, despise, and otherwise hate him. Wait! Fan girls and boys, stay your thumbscrews. Allow me to elaborate.

Sephiroth is the villain I love to hate. In my view, he is true evil in among a gaggle of misunderstoods and neglected children. Every generation has its clichŽs. Our anti-clichŽ culture has become a clichŽ. Consider this:

For last two or three generations, stories and games were all cops and robbers, Allies and Axis, etc.÷archetypes, black and white.

That got old around 1985. Iâm not going to pull a Jerry Falwell now and contend that our society became corrupt that we needed villains with rare and exotic disorders or lingering bitterness from some long past injustice, that we all might find solace with our own evil. The writers all started doing that to say, ãLook! A twist! Our villains arenât just masked bank robbers!ä It was just the thing we needed at the time. After 30-odd years of the aforementioned, society needed villains that it could relate to. We wanted to be able to recognize the evil within ourselves and be the better for knowing our faults.

That time and place is no more. I for one am as sick and tired of gray villains (with precious few exceptions) and sympathy for the devil as I am with all these smart action movies (which itself was a result of the old True Lies formula becoming so passŽ). I find it hugely refreshing to have, just every so often, really bad bad guys. Sephiroth is really bad. If I understand him at all, I still donât feel that I relate to him, nor do I believe him capable of redemption, or myself capable of forgiving him).

And what really made it all so beautiful is that Sephiroth was so bad, yet Cloud was no angel himself. I really got into Cloudâs mind. I wanted to kill Sephiroth÷ not guide some little pixilated man to do it so I could watch the pretty FMVs. I wanted to tear his heart out with my bare hands and eat it. And for just a moment, as Cloud went at his nemesis with Omnislash, slash after savage slash, again and again and again, I was happy. But the ending left me hanging and unfulfilled, as it rightly should have. Indeed, revenge is not the answer.

But with Sephy, what is one to do? A troubled childhood is no excuse. None at all. We have to worry about the planet.