3.1 Villainy and our concept of self
There is no doubt that many people actively enjoy reading about villainous characters, indeed the genre of crime fiction is a very successful one, even despite there being something unsettling about seeing any sorts of similarities between yourself and a villainous character in a book. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry himself expressed his own revulsion to the idea of being like Lord Voldemort:
‘I don’t think I’m like him!’ said Harry, more loudly than he’d intended.
According to psychology, humans want to maintain a positive view of themselves, or to hold what is called a positive self-concept. Making and maintaining a self-concept is a demanding activity both in terms of thinking and behaviour (Siegel, 1999). To maintain a positive sense of self we tend to support positive self statements more than negative (Benenson and Dweck, 1986). Our self-concept is not only tiring to maintain, it can also be quite limiting, for example we are limited to experiences we can realistically have, so the opportunity to escape from both the effort and the constraints of our self-concept might mean that the experience of stories is inherently attractive, as a form of ‘holiday’ from the self and one in which we are able to temporarily abandon our own limits (Slater et al., 2014).
In the real world, then, people avoid information that threatens their sense of self, for example by association with others who are similar to us but who have negative traits, physical features or values. It is argued (e.g. Miller, Downs and Prentice, 1998; Krause and Rucker, 2020) you are likely to want to keep a distance from negative others, in case it reveals something negative about the self. As you have learned previously though, books are an example of a safe space, and both Krause and Rucker (2020) and Slater et al. (2014) both suggest that this separation from the real world (through fiction) might mean that self-threat is mitigated in instances when we are dealing with characters who are fictional.
Activity _unit5.4.1 Activity 2 My villain and me
In Week 1 you made up your own fictional villain. Dig out your notes for that activity and look down the list of what you had written down. Take a few moments to go through the list and underline any similarities you had written into your own villain that you can also see in yourself.
Discussion
This activity might have reminded you of the quote from last week from author Ian Rankin who started to follow his own fictional villain around Edinburgh! Of course though, readers of fiction are more interested in the characters they consume (by reading about them) rather than those they create.
It has been found that in real life similarity to a bad person tends to feel threatening to the self and is likely to lead to us avoiding such people. Krause and Rucker (2020), however, conducted an interesting study to illustrate that this is not the same when the characters we engage with are fictional. They used a data set from Charactour What and Who to Watch. This is a website that is a fan site for characters, allowing users to choose their favourite characters, and also allows the user to take personality tests (please note that you do need to join the site to be able to do this). Their analysis across both data from this fan site, and several subsequent laboratory studies, found that people expressed a preference for villainous characters who were similar to themselves, as long as they were fictional and not real people.