My wife and I just watched the movie Cruella, and it struck me that it’s the latest of several retellings in which classic villains – all of them women – are retconned out of villainy. Maleficent was another; Wicked was perhaps the first, or the first well-known, example, and provided the template.

What also struck me, though, was that Cruella moved the villainy just one step back, giving us a different female villain, a new character, who was pretty similar to how Cruella was originally portrayed. Maleficent straightforwardly makes the male hero of the original story into the villain. Wicked (which, let’s remember, is not a Disney movie like the other two) relocates the villainy in a somewhat more complicated way, to the Wizard (who was, if not an outright villain, at least a dubious character and a fraud in the original Oz story) and, to a lesser extent, other collaborators in the Wizard’s dystopic rule, some of whom are women. All three movies still have villains; they’re just not the same people who were the villains in the original stories. Elphaba in Wicked is not simply a hero, either, though she is a protagonist.

We’re currently seeing a redefinition of heroes and villains in history as well as in classic children’s stories. Statues set up to celebrate people (usually men) of an earlier age are being targeted for removal, based on the actions and attitudes displayed by those men during their lifetime. Other people you haven’t heard of before (usually women) are being newly celebrated. To be clear, I’m not saying that this reassessment is a bad thing, though I do think it gets carried too far by some of its proponents in a few cases.

There’s a certain mindset that always looks for heroes and villains in life, as in art. It simplifies the moral landscape, and lets us know whether we should be supporting or opposing someone. The problem is, following this mindset makes it too easy for us to support actions by our heroes that, if they were done by someone else, would strike us as villainous, and vice versa.

And it’s easy (though similarly reductive) to blame art for this. If the fiction we consume is always divided clearly into black and white hats, how can we break out of that mindset when thinking about real people? But there’s also the argument that the reason this is so prevalent in art is that it’s so prevalent in how people think in real life; it’s how we want to believe the world works. Probably cause and effect go both ways. Limited plaudits go to the writers of the movies mentioned above for calling into question exactly who is a hero and who is a villain, though the plaudits are limited because they still retain the hero-villain divide clearly and strongly; they’re not breaking down the divide, just moving people from one side of it to the other.

But do we need to have villains at all? Tina Turner memorably told us that we don’t need another hero; do we need another villain?

Now, I’m as guilty as anyone of putting straightforward heroes and villains into my art, though I hope that in recent years, at least, I’ve started giving at least the heroes more nuance, showing more of their flaws. They still choose to do the right thing, or what they believe to be the right thing, most of the time, but sometimes they’re tempted not to, and sometimes they yield to that temptation in a moment of weakness, and sometimes along the way they make an honest mistake that they and other people end up paying for.

My villains are less nuanced, in part because they’re usually off screen and never (as far as I can recall) get to be viewpoint characters. It’s something I’m aware of as a weakness in my writing.

I’m put in mind here of the brilliant YouTube comedian Ryan George’s “Pitch Meeting” videos:

“And what’s this character’s deal?”

“Oh, he’s evil.”

Hollywood (which is what George is satirizing) doesn’t need to dig any deeper than that. But what if we did?

It’s quite possible to have an antagonist without having a villain, especially if you show their point of view. I recently read an excellent book which goes some way towards this: The Mask of Mirrors, by M.A. Carrick. At least initially, the viewpoint characters all have agendas which are at cross purposes, and they are, at least partially, each other’s antagonists as a result, though none of them is unequivocally a villain; because we get their viewpoint, we see why they are doing things that we might not completely approve of. (At the same time, there are a couple of unequivocal villains in the book, and the viewpoint characters eventually unite to take them on.)

You don’t even necessarily need a personal antagonist to tell a good story, though it helps. We’re currently in the midst of collectively striving against a natural phenomenon, and that’s a powerful story, though somehow we manage to fight among ourselves about that as well.

The question I’m groping towards is: can we (can I) tell stories that show us a more three-dimensional set of characters, driven by personal flaws and incorrect beliefs as much as by their ideals, clashing in complicated ways? And can we (can I) do that without simply declaring morality illusory and writing an entire cast of grimdark alienated bastards?

While I’m at it, can it be funny? I’ve been reading a lot of early P.G. Wodehouse lately (not all of which was comedic), and appreciating his comic gift, and reflecting that I don’t necessarily want to write something dead serious just because we’ve always been told that serious books are more worthy. I don’t get paid much to write, so I ought to at least have fun doing it.

Wodehouse’s characters are often at odds, too, not because some of them are morally evil but because all of them are human. Also, in his later and better-known works, Wodehouse often pulled off the startling feat of making objectively very low social stakes among a privileged elite matter to the reader, but in at least some of his early work, there were characters who, by chance or even because of moral principle, found themselves in economically difficult straits and had to deal with that, and the unfair nature of the world, as best they were able.

I’m left wondering if I can create a fictional world where things matter, and where people clash, but nobody is unequivocally evilbadwrong and most people have a sense of humour about things, and maybe when the mix-up is sorted out we can all have a laugh together.