☠️ TREE 588: What if the baddie wasn’t?
In Tom Gauld’s book Goliath, the Philistine champion is not actually a fearsome warrior.
What Gauld does – beautifully – with Goliath is not unusual in storytelling. He creates something new, insightful and emotionally rich by humanising a bad guy who actually isn’t bad.
Off the top of my head:
Ballister Blackheart in Nimona
The witch in Wicked
Gru in Despicable Me
Please whack some more examples in the comments!
It’s the entire shtick of The Satanic Temple.
(Then there’s Christopher Nolan’s Joker where he flips the humanisation of the bad guy its head to create a villain who is truly evil.)
‘What if the bad guy is actually…’ doesn’t have to be limited to entertainment or social movements. It can be used in real life to create new and insightful thoughts.
If you are the kind of person who blames yourself a lot, you could reimagine your supposed failures as situations where a good person did their best with the tools they had available. Then you could show yourself the successes among what you previously saw only as failure.
If you are the kind of person who sees yourself as almost certainly right, you could reimagine yourself as the the person who totally misses the point and needs to learn to look at things from new perspectives.
It’s storytelling. It’s play. You don’t have to commit to a different version of reality. Just visit it and see what you discover.
I don't really know you and you don't really know me
Let's shed the old stories and see what's in the room
I want you to surprise me, I'm begging you to move me
Forget what I alrеady learned
Tell mе about you
Grow slowly
Jeff