On origin stories

What makes a supervillain? Really think about it for a moment. I'm not talking about simple criminals trying to make a buck, or even nemeses, whose sole purpose is to destroy their superhero counterpart. I mean the Bond villains, with their nuclear winter scenarios or nation-burning laser satellites. I mean characters like Atrocitus and the Red Lanterns, and certain incarnations of the Joker or Penguin, who come to the conclusion that there is nothing in the world that deserves to live. Someone like Lelouch Lamperouge, spiraling into self-destruction as he attempts to reconstruct the society he sees as broken. Or even the bumbling, comedic Dr. Evil, holding the world at ransom with the threat of complete destruction. What could possibly drive a man to attempt destruction on a global scale, especially considering that it almost guarantees his own destruction? These are supervillains taken to the final, logical end, the ones who are willing to destroy the world for one reason or another, and are also, perhaps unintuitively, the ones we tend to identify the most with.

Many supervillains, especially in comic books, have origin stories revolving around insanity, some single injustice, or both. Otherwise, many are brought up in the system, trained as assassins from childhood or something similar. These stories, however, often do not feel as compelling, and the result is an antagonist who serves as little more than a punching bag for the hero. Insanity is too easily used as an excuse for anything, while the grand injustice angle either doesn't provide the scale or ends up being unreasonable without an insanity clause. Who in reality would seek world destruction, simply over being wronged by a single superhero? More often than not, this leads to the Nemesis; a villain whose sole purpose is the defeat of his counterpart hero, with varying degrees of collateral damage along the way. While we may sympathize with the villain, the scale is too small, the scope of his revenge too narrow. The audience has no beef with the hero, and therefore cannot feel the villain's pain, especially when so often, the supposed injustice is entirely trivial. Finally, we have the villains who were brought up as such; trained from birth to be evil. Again, we feel sorry for them in the sense that the choice was never theirs, and we hope for the redemption scene which may never come, even after their defeat. Yet even with these villains, we cannot truly identify; hardly anybody grows up in a criminal family after all. It is a world unknown to us, which can exist only in fantasy form.

No, in the end, it is the most extreme of supervillains that ring truest to the reader. Anybody can turn to petty crime, or overreact to a perceived wrong. Any man can pick up a weapon in wrath, and strike down another; it is simply a matter of principle that stops us. However, it takes a special type of personality to reach the level of supervillainy where complete, world destruction even reaches the table. It is a combination of strength held too long, tragedy too painful, and sorrow too deep, that produces such a character. A supervillain that dreams of ending the world is not the villain we traditionally think of; he is not inherently evil, should never have become evil. Whether we recognize it or not, we sense that such a supervillain could once have even been a hero, had the fates allowed it.

When considering these supervillains, they fall into two main groups. TVTropes labels them as "Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds," and "Put Them All Out of My Misery." Both are characterized by a lifetime of pain and suffering. The PTAOOMM type is perhaps the less sympathetic of the two, as he rationalizes his actions as punishment or retribution against the world that wronged him, and therefore, feels more distant precisely because he sets himself above and separate from humanity. He is motivated by his pain, and the destruction of the world is a guarantee of his escape. The Woobie, on the other hand, is significantly more identifiable, which makes it that much harder to dislike him. He starts off likable, sometimes even the quintessential nice guy, but the universe singles him out for hardship; misfortune after misfortune, tragedy after tragedy is heaped upon his head. Eventually he breaks, and becomes the Destroyer of Worlds, lashing out at the world that has done nothing but reward his actions with more misery. It is this that makes us feel so close to the newly created supervillain. We've seen what he's had to go through, and so many of his trials are the same ones we deal with on a daily basis, only exaggerated and made more difficult. His reason for destruction is purely reactionary, a visceral response to everything that is wrong with the universe, rather than the pre-meditated punishment meted out by the PTAOOMM. When the Woobie finally breaks, and goes full supervillain, we almost want him to win, because he IS us. And we're okay with him destroying the world, because any world that can treat a person so badly isn't a world we'd want to exist in either.

In the end, we're left crying for the devil. We know what the supervillain is doing is wrong, but it doesn't matter; we may not do the same ourselves, may not be capable of doing the same, but on some level, it is also something most of us have fantasized about at some point, if on a much smaller scale. Who among us hasn't had a bad boss, and imagined storming into the office after getting unfairly chewed out, and slamming down a resignation, bad cop style? Who hasn't been the target of, or seen a bully at work, and dreamed of hulking out, and giving them the beatdown of their lives? We cry for, and sympathize with, the supervillain, because oftentimes, we have gone through many of the same trials. We feel a connection to these characters, on a deep emotional level, because any of us, faced with the same provocations, could very easily come to the same conclusions. And yet, we know that he is wrong, and we know that he must fail in the end, and that is  perhaps the most painful realization of all.