Who invented bad guys? | Aeon Video Essay

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:04]The first time we see Darth Vader in Star Wars, he's strangling a man to death.

[00:00:09]A few scenes later, he's blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, and does all kinds of things a good guy would never do.

[00:00:17]But of course, the point of a bad guy is that he would do the kinds of things [music] a good guy would never do.

[00:00:23]Good guys don't just fight for their own personal gain.

[00:00:26]Instead, they fight for what's right, their values.

[00:00:30]This simple moral dichotomy of good versus evil underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, as well as most Disney cartoons.

[00:00:40]Virtually all of today's biggest pop culture narratives have the same basic structure. Good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of their worlds, and in the end, the good guys almost always win.

[00:00:53]And yet, when you look back at the history of popular storytelling, these ethical tropes don't exist [music] in any classic folktales or myths.

[00:01:01]Stories from an oral tradition almost never have anything resembling modern good guys or bad guys, >> [music] >> despite their reputation for being moralizing.

[00:01:09]For example, in stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk, just who exactly is the good guy?

[00:01:14]>> [music] >> Jack is the protagonist we're meant to root for, but he doesn't have any moral justification for stealing the [music] giant's property.

[00:01:21]Similarly, in the Three Little Pigs, neither the pigs nor the wolf use tactics the other side wouldn't stoop to. It's simply a question of who gets to eat dinner, not a question of good versus evil.

[00:01:32]Individual folktales might show us the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there's no general agreement among them about which actions are good or bad.

[00:01:40]When in one story a character might get their comeuppance for being dishonest, there is just as likely another story in which the protagonist prevail only because they deceive their opponents.

[00:01:51]In the Iliad, [music] the two teams, the Trojans and the Greeks, don't represent a clash of values in the same way that most modern war stories do.

[00:01:59]Neither Achilles nor Hector are fighting to protect the world from their enemies.

[00:02:03]Their fight is simply over which side gets to possess a beautiful woman, and thereby defend their honor.

[00:02:08]So, when exactly did this moral shift in our storytelling occur?

[00:02:13]And maybe more importantly, why did it ever happen in the first place?

[00:02:18]It seems that the narrative face-off between good and evil can be traced back to the early 19th century, when Europeans were changing how they thought about nations.

[00:02:26]When the Grimm brothers wrote down their famous folktales in the 1800s, their aim was to define the character of the people who told these stories.

[00:02:34]The old idea was that a country was just the land controlled by a leader, and its citizens, the people who happened to live there.

[00:02:41]But the Grimm brothers, inspired by the German philosophers of their time, were working with a new concept of the modern nation, one defined by language, culture, and folklore.

[00:02:50]The purpose of their stories was not just to entertain, but also to preserve the moral character of their homeland, with antagonists portrayed as villains who attacked those morals.

[00:03:01]As the Grimm brothers' stories spread across Europe, other fabulists took note of their nationalizing power and began to write their own tales of regional folklore.

[00:03:10]As politicians and armies carved increasingly permanent lines onto the global map to divide their conquered lands, storytellers helped entrench those lines with the belief that people on opposite sides of these borders had different and even opposing qualities.

[00:03:24]They worked to establish that it was broader social values, and not [music] just dinner or pretty women, that were at stake in the real-life conflicts that their stories dramatized.

[00:03:33]For example, there's Robin Hood. Before Joseph Ritson's 1795 retelling of these legends, stories about Robin Hood mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men.

[00:03:43]He didn't rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson's version, written in support of an uprising for the British working class that would be similar to the French Revolution.

[00:03:51]Accordingly, the character of the Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who directly embodied the abuses of the powerful against the powerless.

[00:04:01]Or, consider the legend of King Arthur.

[00:04:04]In the 12th century, poets writing about him were frequently from countries like France, because King Arthur wasn't yet closely associated with the soul of Great Britain.

[00:04:13]His adversaries were often literal monsters, rather than other humans who symbolized moral weakness.

[00:04:19]But by the early 19th century, when Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the Idylls of the King, King Arthur had become an ideal of British manhood, one who battles characters with moral frailties, rather than dragons and ogres.

[00:04:31]A telling feature of this modern shift in storytelling is that characters now change sides in their conflicts.

[00:04:37]If a character's identity resides in his values, then when he changes his mind about a moral question, he's essentially swapping sides.

[00:04:44]In Star Wars, Darth Vader changes his mind about anger and hatred, and switches sides in his war with Luke and the rebels.

[00:04:52]Because the opposing teams each represent a set of human properties, which side Darth Vader fights on is dependent on whether it's anger or love that is foremost in his heart.

[00:05:02]Contrast this [music] with the Iliad, where Achilles doesn't become a Trojan when he's angry at Agamemnon.

[00:05:07]Since their conflict is not a metaphor for some internal battle over morals, switching sides because of a change of heart would have made little sense to the ancient Greeks.

[00:05:17]Another peculiarity of modern storytelling is that bad guys often have no sense of empathy, and routinely punish their own.

[00:05:23]Whether it's the Joker killing off his bank robbing partners, or Darth Vader killing his subordinates, these bad guys are often shown to be cavalier with human life, happy to punish [music] their allies for even the most petty transgressions.

[00:05:36]Good guys, on the other hand, will accept [music] anyone into their fold, and are easily forgiving when their teammates act poorly.

[00:05:42]Protagonists often will work with rogues, oddballs, and rascals, as long as they all share the same values.

[00:05:48]Their battles with these haphazardly crafted coalitions might even hinge on someone who was treated badly by the antagonist [music] crossing over and becoming a good guy.

[00:05:57]Consider, for example, the rebels of Star Wars welcoming the roguish Han Solo and Lando Calrissian to their side. Now, imagine Achilles winning because [music] his army was composed of a bunch of rejects and malcontents from the Trojans. Again, the people of the ancient world would have been baffled by such a story.

[00:06:15]Unfortunately, this modern style of narrative ends up discouraging any actual moral deliberation.

[00:06:21]Instead, it simply categorizes people according to the values they symbolize, flattening their ethical complexity into a single dimension.

[00:06:29]Either a person is team good, or they belong to team evil.

[00:06:33]I'm just saying what >> Just saying.

[00:06:34]>> Just what? Well, you're American, okay?

[00:06:39]Okay.

[00:06:40]What kind of American are you?

[00:06:44]In the real world, this kind of simple partisan thinking can lead to the embrace of otherwise unsavory characters for short-term political, moral, or ideological gains.

[00:06:54]While these good guy-bad guy narratives may harbor a diminished moral sophistication, they also promote a kind of social stability that would have been unfathomable [music] in previous eras, one without which the modern world would likely not exist.

[00:07:06]Such stories were useful in getting people to sign up for armies and fight wars with other nations.

[00:07:12]It's no coincidence that today's movies, comic books, and video games have large and impassioned fandoms.

[00:07:17]Even the word fandom suggests the idea of a nation or a kingdom.

[00:07:21]But these stories about superheroes fighting the good fight, or wizards battling to save the world, rarely convey real morality.

[00:07:28]Instead, they largely replace true ethical deliberation with snap judgments.

[00:07:32]The only thing they can teach us is that people on the other team are wicked, often beyond redemption.

[00:07:38]In fact, our enemies are so bad that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to defeat these moral monsters.

[00:07:46]Author Andrea Pitzer has said that three inventions collided to [music] make concentration camps a reality: barbed wire, automatic weapons, and the belief that whole categories of people should be locked up.

[00:07:57]When we read, watch, and tell stories of good guys warring [music] against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, and indeed, they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or value for human life.

[00:08:11]We are convincing ourselves that they are, to their very essence, bad people.

[00:08:16]Such stories emerged from the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people, often those who simply look or speak like each other.

[00:08:24]Perhaps we should be a bit more wary of these kinds of stories, and consider what role they may play in shaping our personal, or even our national understanding of who we consider [music] to be our enemies.

[00:08:34]Maybe, we should even turn around and think about who exactly is telling us these stories in the first place.