By Luke Durling
So, hear me out. I’ve came to a realization that I don’t think is apparent to many of us as a species, but I’m going to try to express my thought process.
Evil is boring.
I came to this realization after reading and watching several comics and movies including The Riddler, Batman’s quizzical and quirky nemesis that has been portrayed as everything from a scavenger hunt manager to a master manipulative terrorist. Then, I realized something. The Joker has been all of those exact same things.
Then, I realized every killer clown trope ever made was essentially some part of what The Joker was and/or will be.
Then, it finally hit me.
Everything that is purely evil is only that, pure evil.
And that gets boring.
Think about it. One of the key stresses of today is that we can know almost everything bad or evil that is going on right now. Why is that so stressful? Because it makes it seem like a pattern we can’t escape from, a fact of life that is unavoidable. Essentially, we get so beaten down and bored with all the tragedies and evil in the world that we feel like that’s all there is.
We are bored into cynicism.
This is not to say that we don’t willingly participate at times. No, we are far from the angels of heaven we try to come across as. It is much easier to be a villain than a hero. That’s what makes it so utterly pointless and dull. Any person can do bad things for bad reasons. Not a single person hasn’t. We do it even without realizing we’re doing it, even, which in and of itself is a bad reason for doing anything. Anyone can just do whatever they want for any reason at all just because they feel like it. Nothing is stopping them. No law or anything will prevent anyone from being evil. It just seems like the easy way to be.
That is, until you realize that it’s not chaos that you want, you want control over your life and your surroundings. Chaos might seem appealing, but even the people who claim to thrive on absolute chaos have at least a few plans or rules they follow. Even the Joker plans, despite claiming otherwise, and for what reason? To control the situation. See, no one who is evil wants to admit that what they want could be achieved by actually good means. No villain is going to admit they could have just worked harder and advocated for higher wages and start non-violent protests to help themselves and the people around them when they just could rob a bank instead. Anyone who has tried to take an easy route winds up doing the same thing every other villain has done. Why try anything else because everyone else has done it?
Villains are the clichés we think are real because we think we can’t escape their fallacies.
That is tedious. That is uninspired. That is toxic.
That is boring.
No, what I want people to understand is that the world doesn’t have to be like this. Evil on evil.
Hate on hate. Horror on horror. If that’s all we have, that’s boring, destructive and sad.
Luckily, there IS more than that. It might be harder to make and come by, but all that is good and wholesome is not impossible, it exists, it always has, it always will and there’s always room for more.
Let’s never get so bored with evil that we forget that we are standing in the light.
Calm and Cultured 