Second Fiddles and the Dangers of the Villain Sue

You know what I hate? When a writer of a series decide to introduce a villain and just ends up essentially lobotomizing and diminishing the heroes just to make that villain look “cool”. 

I think that’s why I never warmed up to Venom when he was Eddie Brock, appearing in Amazing Spider-Man and being written by David Michelinie. Because whenever Venom appeared, Spider-Man lost all the wit and competence he usually had. The constant quipping and making fun of the villains, as well as the never-say-die attitude just vanished, replaced with internal monologues about how awful this was and how terrifying Venom was, while Venom got all the best dialogue and totally dominated the scene. It was clear that David Michelinie wanted me to think Venom was a really cool, really dangerous villain… the problem was that one of the ways he decided to achieve this was by making Spider-Man LESS cool and LESS competent. 

Now, both Venom and David Michelinie had several other moments where they were pretty good. Though I still hold that Venom was a pretty bad character until Flash Thompson got the Venom symbiote and the symbiote itself went through some much needed character development… for the MOST part Venom had enough going on that he JUST managed to avoid becoming a Villain Sue.

You  know Villain Sues, right? They’re villain versions of Mary Sues. Now usually I’m not too fond of using the term “Mary Sue”… it’s kinda loaded. I may have touched on this subject before, but just in case: “Mary Sue” used to be a term for “Author’s Darling” characters (more common in fanfics, but not unheard of in professionally created work) who got special treatment from the story, was always the best and coolest and most admirable, or the most pitiful and the one who had suffered like NOBODY ELSE had  suffered. However, the team since broadened so much that it became useless, especially since certain people began using it as short for “female character I don’t like”, which tended to include female characters that had even a small moment of competence.

But a VILLAIN Sue… now that’s a less loaded term because it can only ever apply to villains. It’s okay for villains to be overpowered and dominating and the “best” at things, because villains are threats for the hero to survive, or challenges for the hero to overcome.  It’s also quite common for villains to steal the show; just think of all the classic Disney villains. To get a Villain Sue… well, let’s look at the characters I’m going to rant about today. 

See, there’s this audio drama podcast called Second Fiddles, about a support group for superhero sidekicks. I discovered it last year and listened through the first two seasons, and I enjoyed it. It was funny, with some comedic banter and a semi-interesting ongoing plot. For someone who was suffering from Marve-and-DC-fatigue but still wanted a bit of a superhero fix (especially since I was still doing a lot of worldbuilding for Project Eryss), this was a pretty decent show. I even laughed out loud a few times. The characters weren’t super interesting, but they were likeable enough.

And then came the Villain Sues, and everything went downhill.

The third season introduced the Kromins, villainous alien shapeshifters whose main deal is that they use their shapeshifting to place “sleeper agents” on other planets, disguised as that planet’s dominant species. The sleeper agents then goes and fucks a lot of the dominant species to create lots of Kromin babies in order to, within a few generations, replace most of that species with Kromins, and then the planet becomes part of the Kromin empire, with the “superior Kromins” ruling over the “pathetic inferior statics” (“static” being the Kromin word for someone who can’t shapeshift).

One of the supporting characters, the shapeshifting superheroine Chameleon, who has a very Superman-esque origin — adopted as a baby by a kindly human couple, grew up in a small rural town, discovered her powers and became a superheroine —  turns out to have been one of these Kromin sleeper agents all along, there to fuck and breed and create lots of Kromins. Yeah, I know, this is kind of the twist of that James Gunn Superman movie. But where James Gunn wisely kept Superman as the hero of the movie, who rejected the entire ordeal because he wasn’t interested in replacing the human race and just wanted to help people… Chameleon STARTS OUT as having the same reaction, but… this is where the entire thing gets really convoluted and frankly really stupid, so bear with me here.

The fourth season is largely dedicated to the overarching plot of superheroes and -heroines vanishing, and once a person has vanished nobody even remembers that this person even existed. It’s supposed to be a “what is going on?” type plot. Turns out they’re all getting mind-controlled and kidnapped and held at a secret ranch where they are kept happy and docile like in a cult, which also involves a lot of orgies, and it’s all really a part of a scheme for the supervillain Rose (another Villain Sue) to find and collect some blatant knockoff of Marvel’s Infinity Gems. 

Now… I know, you’d THINK this sort of thing was right up my alley; I love mind control and brainwashed superheroes and mind-controlled orgies. But for some reason this storyline just rubbed me the wrong way. But it took me some time, in fact, until long after this storyline was over, to realize just WHAT my problems with it was.

Because Chameleon was one of the abducted heroines. And she participated in the mind-controlled orgies. And when the storyline was over and everyone was rescued (though Rose had got away and vanished because of course she did), she reveals that she’s pregnant. And with her pregnancy her “Kromin instincts” have activated and now she’s just a cackling villain who declares herself superior to everyone, insists that humanity is pathetic, and launches into smug speeches about her own superiority and how weak and pathetic and stupid her human girlfriend Sofia is, before going off to join Rose in the hunt for the knockoff infinity gems.

And come the fifth season, Rose and Chameleon are the worst types of Villain Sue EVER. They become this unstoppable threat that the heroes have no chance against… not because they’re so brilliant and clever and dangerous, but because the show’s writing bends over backwards to make everything work out for them so they constantly win, and in any confrontation the heroes lose whatever competence and wit they may have had and just go down easily. They fall for schemes and ploys they SHOULD have seen through, they’re fooled by the simplest of lies, and they lose to attacks they should have been able to resist.

And this is when I start realizing what the problem is: The writers want me to think both Rose and Chameleon are really cool, really special, really awesome villains. They want me to be torn up by how heartbreaking it is that Chameleon has become a villain and is now working against her former friends…and when Chameleon, and to a lesser extent Rose, make their gloating villain speeches I’m supposed to go “GASP! They are making sense! Do they have a point? Oh no, what morally grey and nuanced characters they are!”

Except… no. They’re not morally grey. They’re not nuanced. They’re not awesome. And they most certainly do not have a point. 

Chameleon, despite insisting that she doesn’t care what inferior humans think of her anymore, certainly makes a BIG DEAL out of how hypocritical they are for calling her evil when she is just being a Kromin. You can’t blame a tiger for eating a deer, you can’t blame a predator for following its instincts, you can’t blame a goose for being a fucking asshole. It’s just biology, and they just do what their instincts demand in order to survive. So you weak, pathetic humans should just get off your high horse and stop being so judgmental.

If this argument sounds stupid, it’s because it is. Tigers may kill and eat deer because they’re hungry, but they don’t make self-glorifying speeches on how deer are inferior. Geese are territorial assholes, but they don’t plot to infiltrate other species and replace them with more geese. And more importantly, tigers and geese and wild predators act the way they do because they don’t have the capacity or brain functions to make other choices. Kromins supposedly have higher brain functions, they’re capable of high technology and space travel. They clearly have evolved beyond being slaves to their instincts, and blaming their atrocities and superiority complex on “instinct” is just as stupid and pathetic as all those dudes who justify sexual assault with “I’m a MAN, I can’t HELP MYSELF!” 

Plus, it’s kind of laughable for the Kromins to call humans judgmental when they can’t string two sentences together without aggressively judging anyone who isn’t them.

But do you think Second Fiddles ever grasps this? Nope. Despite this “can’t blame a predator for being a predator, you intolerant judgmental humans!” argument showing up three times, three episodes in a row, NONE of the heroes challenge it. And it doesn’t help that all three episodes are essentially just “Chameleon and her subordinate Ploonjer trick the heroes, stun them, place power dampening collars on them and abduct them.” The tricks are always so transparent that the heroes just come across as total idiots for falling for them… and worse, hey come across as even more feeble and lacking in any moral backbone and conviction when they can’t even muster any counterarguments to that brainless “don’t blame predators for being predators” speech. Their protests pretty much begin and end with “you can’t do this!”

Because the scriptwriters REALLY WANT me to see Chameleon as a brilliant and morally complex mastermind. But when her arguments are so weak they don’t hold up to five seconds of thought, and her strategy is just to do the same thing over and over again and it only works because the heroes are too stupid to catch on, she just becomes a Villain Sue who wins because the script wants her to. And the story stops feeling like a conflict between heroes and villains and starts feeling like repeated villain TED talks.

And in addition to it all you have Rose, who is similarly invincible and whose successes mostly hinge on the heroes becoming incompetent, but who is treated as a terrible threat… and her motivation turns out to be that she wants to get rid of all superpowers because “superpowers hurt people”… which WOULD have been more sympathetic if she hadn’t killed heroes on-screen and shown no remorse. And again we get the “but… maybe she was right all along” idiocy from heroes who don’t seem to have any moral backbone at all.

When the fourth season finale ended up with Rose’s plans working, most supers in the world losing their powers, and both Rose and Chameleon escaping yet again, I was DONE with this podcast.  I said the Eight Deadly Words, the ones no story can survive: “I don’t CARE what happens to these people!”

And that’s how Villain Sues ruin a story.

Okay, okay, I’m guilty of writing smug villains who end up winning in the end too. Much of Project Eryss revolves around it… I mean I write superheroines in erotic peril, it’s part of the genre. Sometimes the stories ends with the heroines or innocent protagonists captured, brainwashed and turned into sex slaves, and even if they are eventually freed or implied to be freed later on, the villains quite often go free and unchallenged.

But you know what these stories DON’T do?  They don’t spend any time pretending that the villains have a point. They don’t present lame “moral” justifications and have the heroes be incapable of making counterarguments… or if they ARE incapable of making counterarguments you know it’s because they’ve either been mind-controlled or knocked out. Because I don’t want my villains to come across as annoying Villain Sues. (It’s why I’m keeping Lord Waric’s appearances sparse.)

So no, what ruined Second Fiddles for me wasn’t that the villains were mean, or dark, or kinky, or manipulative, or that they won. What ruined it was the sheer smug stupidity of it all. Chameleon and Rose kept winning, not because they were such incredible antagonists, but because the story kept handing them victories and then expecting me to be impressed. But I’m not impressed; their arguments are stupid, their ideology is stupid, their “moral complexity” is fake, and their confrontations are a joke because every time they just stun the heroes and remove their powers, and that’s that.

That’s what Villain Sue writing does. It doesn’t make villains feel bigger. It makes the entire world around them feel smaller, flatter, and dumber.