I prefer villains that aren't tools of liberal propaganda.

1. Take a person that has a very right cause.
2. Make them the worst person possible in all other aspects.
3. Profit from vilifying the cause you don't like.

Superhero movies from DC all have this trope about never killing villains and inevitably letting them murder innocent people again being supposedly a good thing. We all know who benefits from this kind of garbage filling people's minds IRL.

One of methods of sustaining this terrible narrative is creating atrocious villains that happen to challenge our glorious heroes for this bullshit. The Reverse Flash comes in mind immediately. Batman and Superman also got called out multiple times by their villains.

Of course, when a hero breaks this rule in some alt universe, they immediately become terrible people over day in all aspects of their life, like Superman in Injustice immediately going crazy because he killed the Joker.

I was gonna write a big long thing like the other posters but in the end I just decided to say, I despise the "humanized villain" trope. Because it all always feels like propaganda. It's all always about how they suffered in an unjust society and now they are rebelling against it. It all always feels like they are trying to train people to see anyone that wants to change the current system as bad.

I was my villains to be proper evil. Make them a mirror image of the actual oligarchy.

I would say for me, it's less about how they're presented and more about the ideology behind it. Like if someone wants to present white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism in fairly binary terms, I kinda feel like, yeah, why not. We don't need to be acting like they deserve their "side of the argument" to be taken seriously. But sometimes this is used in the opposite direction, to simplify and vilify in order to justify those institutions. Like James Bond villains who make his role and judge/jury/executioner style seem necessary because they are like "teehee I want to blow up the world" or something stupid like that.

On the "humanized villain" end, again, it can be interesting if it's not also trying to justify them. Wicked (the movie, have not seen the play) I think does a good job of writing behavior in a way that taps into "where people come from" without making it seem like it's excusing villainy (it's also in general written better than I would have expected and might surprise some people in the direction it goes). But then you have shit like Batman Begins with Ra's al Ghul, where it comes across like he's there to be just human enough to make it seem edgy and surprising, but also so unhinged in his behavior and justifications that it makes Batman look reasonable by comparison; which is a thing capitalist/imperialist movies like that love to do, where they erase actual revolutionary dynamics of class societies and instead represent discontent only as unhinged people who want to destroy.

I want my villains to be believable, which means they need to fit both their nature and conditions.

If you write a villain that is clearly human or human-adjacent they need to be nuanced and authentic, or else they're not believable and feel less like a character and more like a caricature. They need to either by oblivious to their evil due to having a warped moral compass or in denial of their evil because they believe what they do is necessary even if they don't agree with it. They especially need to have some kind of 'logic' (for lack of a better term) that allows them to reach this mistaken conclusion and which can survive interrogation & analysis up to a certain point. They don't need to be sympathetic per se but I think when you look at them you need to be able to go "oh yeah, I can see how they reached that conclusion even though it's obviously wrong".

However if you're writing, say, a demon - a creature often depicted as being incapable of things like love or empathy and lacking a soul, only capable of imitating human emotions rather than actually possessing them - then it needs to be pure evil to represent that it isn't human or human-adjacent; to emphasize that this is otherworldly or unnatural. At the very least it needs to be unknowable, like an eldritch god, so that its evil seems pure simply because we can't understand how it thinks and only see the cruelty of its actions detached of any understanding of its intent.

I generally like complex and fleshed out villains. Black and white plots are really hard to take seriously. Good writing involves making a believable villain with plausible motivations and reasons for doing what they do.

I lean towards pure evil villains but either can work if done right. DBZ shines because of its villains and especially Frieza in particular. His personality was based off predatory real estate speculators during the Japanese economic bubble and it shows. He's evil because he's a spoiled brat born into an uncontested level of power like most bourgeoisie in real life are.

When humanizing villains it should be done to expose greater flaws, to show how material neglect can lead people to a life of crime and what not. Breaking Bad does this well with it's characters.

Depends on the mood and intent. Pure evil villains are good for movies were the conflict is not that complex, like Superman or Lion King (cartoon), and you're just going along for the ride. They can even be made compelling while completely unredeemable, like Scar.

Humanized ones are better when the driving conflict is meant to actually be conflicting for the audience. Kilgrave in Jessica Jones comes to mind as an absolutely despicable horrible person, who is still humanized from beginning to end, which makes sense because a central theme of the first season is about fleeing or confronting abuse and the normalisation of such abuse in society, and whether abusers are capable or willing to change. Spoilers for a 10 year old series, but it concludes with a resounding "no, fuck that" that would be nowhere near as compelling if Kilgrave was portrayed as just evil. (Great series, highly recommend)

it depends on the genre, but I think I may prefer pure evil more, though I don't want them to act utterly stupid just because of it. Pure calculating evil.

I dunno. It probably doesn't matter, only that the reason for their villainy is established well. Such as a snarky kid who grows up to be an imperialist warmonger. I also particularly like Lovecraftian forces that are not directly fought, but only hinted at. Also also are villains that resemble horrible people in real life, like a hateful dictator resembling Hitler, or a money-hungry industrialist resembling Rockefeller or Henry Ford.

Definitely pure evil. If you make a villain too sympathetic then the writing inevitably takes a nose dive because "Why are we fighting?"