The villains we love & the heroes we hate
In most of fairy-tales, not to say in all fairy-tales, we find the well-known memes of the villain and the hero. However, those memes are sometimes reversed. In most of Disney’s retellings of fairy-tales, the villains are often even more evil than they are depicted in the original tale, but they are also the most misunderstood and entertaining characters. This tendency of liking the bad guy in a story has created more and more anti-heroes those recent years, like Dr.House, Walter White in Breaking Bad or Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones.
In The Tinder Box by Hans Christian Andersen, a soldier returning home from war meets a witch on the road who wants to make a deal with him: he has to go down in a tree, take a tinderbox that is there for her, and he can keep all the gold from the tree for himself. At this time, the soldier appears as the potential hero of the tale, and the witch, of course, as the villain who promises him something, but is probably plotting against him. Not at all! Yes, she is a witch, but she told him the truth, and in return, the brave soldier decides to cut her head off, steal her tinderbox, kidnap the king’s daughter every night to kiss her and more in her sleep, kill the king and queen and many more.
In The Little Mermaid (both the original version from Andersen and the Disney’s retelling), the sea-witch, supposedly the villain in the story, is the only one who tries to fulfil the mermaid’s dream and to make her happy. She even warns her of the dangers, and yes, in the movie she has an ulterior evil motive for this, but she was fair and made Ariel sign a very precise contract. It’s not her fault if the little mermaid didn’t read it carefully and understood what she was giving up!
