The Perspective Change

I’d like to start this with a scenario, one from a popular movie. Well, it was very popular, but nowadays it seems that the new generations don’t know it that well, even though they still use some of its phrases, memes, and even some of the philosophical questions it raised.

Let’s get to the scenario:
Imagine you are someone who loves your country. You’re proud of your country, proud to belong to it. You want to contribute, to be useful to your community, so you become a law enforcer. Since you like your country and you like your job, you perform really well at it, and it doesn’t take long for you to move up the ranks. Pretty quickly, comparatively, you reach leadership positions. Eventually, you get to lead a special unit, an anti-terrorist squad. A nice position to have, one that you’ll absolutely give your best in, because you love your nation, you love your job, and protecting citizens from external threats is exactly what you’re meant to do.

But now terrorists are attacking, and well, you lead the anti-terrorism division, so of course, you have to act. These terrorists are kidnapping people, blowing up important buildings and infrastructure, hell, they even threw a helicopter into one of the city’s biggest buildings!
So, you do your job, you try to apprehend these villains, these terrorists. You try to capture their leader, try to neutralize their members, all of it, completely in line with what’s expected of you, what is expected of your job.

Are you a hero or a villain in this case?

The scenario I just described, aside from the “you chose to be a law enforcer” part, because he didn’t really have a choice, he was “born” a law enforcer, but everything else is real, or as real as any fictional character can be. I’m talking about Agent Smith, from The Matrix.
One of my favorite movies of all time.

In this movie, we see everything from the perspective of the terrorists, the rebels. From this point of view, the trio of rebels are the heroes, and the law enforcers of the Matrix are the villains. But things aren’t that simple. If you take a few seconds and try to force your perspective, to stretch your empathy toward the other side, you can see that they, the law enforcers, are the heroes. And the rebel trio are actually the villains.

Quite a difficult topic, isn’t it?

And the same can be said for pretty much every story out there, movies, series, books, games, who’s the villain and who’s the hero can often be flipped around without much effort. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even need to rewrite anything. Just a change in point of view, and the hero becomes the villain, the villain becomes the hero.

Of course, there are some stories where the villain is just plain evil. But those stories tend to be not as good, or they rely so much on cliché that people stop caring, or they’re just simple stories made for little kids, or the story has so many characters that a couple of pure evil ones are ok to have. I’ve noticed that the really good stories, the ones that last for decades, the ones people genuinely love, allow for this kind of shift. You can flip the perspective.

Even Sauron isn’t pure evil, well, he is described like that, but If you just change your point of view, suddenly he’s someone who sees the creation of God being torn apart by greed, pettiness, and ignorance. And with his knowledge and power, he takes on the responsibility of trying to unify the world. See? Not so evil now, right? (He goes around killing and destroying, but let’s just ignore that part for a moment, for the sake of argument.)

This is something I like to do, to shift the point of view. Of course, it’s not always possible. Like with Ramsay or Joffrey from Game of Thrones, that story has plenty of straight-up evil characters who do evil things just because they enjoy the suffering. But even there, some characters who are painted as evil can be seen as heroes if you shift your perspective a bit. Not all of them, sure, but some.

That change in perspective is something I enjoy doing. Often, when I finish a book or a movie, I catch myself thinking about it, about the possibilities, about how it could’ve ended differently. (Not as a critique of the author, just more like what I would’ve done if I were in the character’s shoes.) And more often than not, I find I can exercise some empathy, shift the point of view, and reflect on the villain’s actions, and ask myself if they really are the villain of the story… or if it’s the other way around.

Anyway, just a random grumble.
Point of view can be tricky. And I don’t like when it’s shoved down my throat, I prefer to check both sides and decide for myself who the real villain is.