For a while now, I've been involved in certain fandoms that heap mountains of praise on "tragic" villains while demonizing relatively normal characters for their own actions. Not only do these fans miss the point of the characters they're gushing over, but this trope makes the writing suffer as well. Let me explain.
I'm all for villains to be written with depth and complexity. Characters without any interesting or subversive qualities, even if it's something as basic as someone having an unexpected hobby or a unique backstory, tend to not be very fun characters. This isn't always true; some of my favorite characters are ones other consider "cardboard", because I happen to like normal, respectable, likable characters who aren't excessively flashy or time-hogging. When it comes to villains, I'm happy to see them get some development and exploration, even if I prefer to just see them take action and be evil. However, there's a massive difference between "depth" and "justification".
When villain characters are given tragic backstories, it's usually not done to explain how they turned out a certain way or to contrast them with the kid they used to be. They're usually written to act as sympathy-bait, making the audience feel bad for the character. This is where I draw the line. I don't want to see Michael Myers have an abusive stepfather in a reboot, I want to see him be a mysterious killer with undefined motives. Horror comes from the unknown, and a good villain doesn't need to be someone the audience understands- they just need to be someone the audience is engaged in and finds threatening. The more abuse piled onto a character to justify them being evil, the more the rest of the story around them is simplified and watered down. Being a product of a bad past doesn't make a villain complex- it makes them trope-y.
As a proud contributor to TV Tropes, I should say that I don't have anything against using tropes, even if they're ones I dislike. But if you want your villain to be interesting, you should do more than just throw a few dozen Freudian Excuses their way. Not every evil character needs to be someone who was hurt in the past; it's just as much a cliché as the moustache-twirling evildoer who cackles as he ties a damsel to a railroad. At least the second one is cheesy and fun- tragic villain backstories are almost always so extreme that I can't take them seriously, but they're so dark I also can't laugh. I'm left feeling empty and emotionally manipulated into caring about someone who'll later go onto be a serial killer or evil dictator.
What always gets me the most is how every other character is corrupted as a result. Going back to the Michael Myers example, in giving him a sad backstory, they developed one character while creating an entire cast of one-dimensional monsters. If the point is to show how someone can turn evil, doing it by making them the victim of someone else's evil is hypocritical and backwards. I'm left wondering "Okay, but how did THAT character turn out so bad?". I'm left to assume that everyone else is just cartoonishly extreme and focused on ruining the life of the future villain just so we don't feel too bad when that villain slaughters them. I understand that abuse happens in real life and that not every character needs to be well-rounded, but if you're going to try and make your bad guy more sympathetic, you shouldn't go about it by making everyone else around them even less likable than they are.
No series seems to do this more than Warrior Cats does. The books have a variety of interesting villains with varying skillsets, motivations, and levels of evil. They have evil Hitler-esque dictators and bitter ex-lovers; child abusers and serial killers; even a character who just wants to manipulate everyone around him because he gets a kick out of it. What do all these characters have in common, aside from being cats and very often being "dark brown tabby toms"?
Most of them are given tragic backstories. The evil dictator's father left at a young age. The ex-lover's mother died, and he "only loved too much". The child abuser was abused as a kit as well, and the serial killer was exiled by her Clan shortly before her kits died in a tragic flood. The manipulator was kicked out for being incompatible with Clan life and vowed revenge. And, for a lot of these characters, the fandom eats these things up and then declares that the obviously evil character is just misunderstood and that it's the cats from their backstory who are responsible for their evil. Not only have I never been able to understand this mindset, but I also can't stand the idea of feeling bad for characters who have slaughtered others without remorse, or who attempted to hurt innocents just because they're angry. I'm left arguing in multiple discussions that these characters aren't justified simply because they had a bad backstory, but the opinion and trope persists regardless.
Going forward, I want to see this change. I want to see more variety. Some villains can be made sympathetic, but others still can be unrepentant monsters, or well-intentioned characters who took the wrong path, or even characters with a deep moral conflict who give into their darker side. I don't want to see every villain become justified and tragic- I want to see villains who are unique and rounded, and treated more like characters than as plot devices.
Because, after all, being rounded doesn't mean sympathetic, and everyone has the potential to be the villain or hero of their own story. Why not make that story a well-written one?
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