We Love Complex Villains. We Struggle With Complex Parents
There is a gap between the complexity we extend to fictional characters and to the people who raised us.
Hi, I’m Dr. Rana.
I’m a clinical psychologist and founder of Sorted Mind. I write about the lifelong journey of parenthood and family relationships, from the peripartum period to adulthood. I am also fascinated by the patterns of overcorrection in our lives, and how individualistic wellness trends and AI impact our relationships and wellbeing. I provide workshops, training, and consultation for therapists.
I hope these articles will help you sort through the messy parts of life.
We love a good villain backstory
Given the number of successful movies that dig into the past of infamous villains, it is undeniable that uncovering their backstory is appealing. We stopped being satisfied with villains who were simply evil. We wanted to know why. The wound, the betrayal, the moment where things went wrong.
I’ve been reflecting on stories that have been accepted, even embraced, on screen in recent years. In Joker, we meet Arthur Fleck before he becomes Batman’s nemesis. He lives through poverty, isolation, mental illness, and public humiliation. He endures a society that fails him at every turn. The viewer is not asked to approve of his choices later on. He is asked to be curious about who he was before.
The story of Maleficent explores the origin story of the cold, ruthless antagonist of Sleeping Beauty. A young girl who trusted someone, was betrayed violently by having her wings cut off while she slept, became isolated, mistrustful, and hardened. In this movie, Maleficent’s pain amplifies, and contaminates her relationship with Aurora. What better analogy for intergenerational trauma?
My recent favourite is Wicked. It flips the world of Oz by asking:
What if the villain was never the villain?
Elphaba — the Wicked Witch of the West — is reframed as someone who was socially rejected, politically scapegoated, and demonized precisely because she refused to stop speaking up. The people in power needed a villain. She was convenient.
None of these stories excuse the harm caused. By offering context, they humanize people who have done destructive, sometimes terrible things. And audiences have shown, repeatedly, that they are capable of holding both: this person caused harm and I understand how they got there.
We can do that with stories. We struggle to do it with our families.
There is plenty of room for misunderstanding, and I want to be careful.
This article is not about dismissing the impact of intergenerational trauma or childhood adverse events. Growing up with a parent who was emotionally unavailable, critical, controlling, or simply not equipped to meet their child’s needs is real and deserves to be taken seriously. It is worth exploring, understanding, and sorting through to make meaning. The repair that needs to take place requires intention and courage.
But there is a meaningful difference between acknowledging how your upbringing shaped you in ways that feel thwarted, and villainizing the parent.
What I have noticed — in clinical work, and in the broader cultural conversation around family and mental health — is a growing tendency, and acceptance, to do the latter. We have allowed labels — narcissist, emotionally immature, toxic — to become the whole story. A narrative has crystalized where the parent is a unidimensional villain.
The same people who will sit in a cinema and feel compassion — or at least mixed feelings — toward a fictional villain, who will argue passionately that Elphaba was a product of her circumstances, that Arthur Fleck was a failure of systems, that Maleficent’s bitterness was a completely understandable response to devastating betrayal — can struggle to extend even a fraction of that curiosity to the parent who was unable to show up, who said the wrong thing for twenty years, who loved imperfectly and sometimes damagingly.
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This is Why
Part of the answer is the safety of fictional stories. We can feel compassion for the Joker because he cannot actually hurt us. Our parents can, and they have. Even the most attentive, present, warm parent has missed the mark. But the closer someone is to our wounds, the harder it is to hold their humanity at the same time as the pain they have caused.
Part of the answer is that the language available to us — the therapy-speak, which is inherently pathologizing, has become the framework for describing family. The words we use are accusatory, deterministic, and absolute. Dysfunctional, narcissistic, broken — these words provide clarity and relief. But once someone is the narcissist in your story, curiosity is harder to access. Why would I need to understand their story? You’ve lived it after all. Relational curiosity feels like excuse-making or even questioning your reality. And compassion starts to feel like a betrayal of yourself.
And part of the answer, I think, is that we have not fully grappled with what it means to hold another person’s complexity alongside our own. It requires — dare I say — emotional maturity. Holding two truths at once means sitting with the fact that someone both hurt you and was shaped by forces that hurt them. It means the story is messy. It means your pain is real and so is their humanity.
The storytellers behind Wicked, Maleficent, and Joker understood something that family systems clinicians have known for a long time: people do not become destructive in a vacuum. Families do not become “dysfunctional” out of the blue. Behaviour that harms others almost always has a history, and a function.
I repeat: understanding that history does not make the harm acceptable. It does not mean the adult child is required to reconcile, or to offer access they are not ready to give, or to minimize what they experienced.
But it does change the quality of the story we tell, and it can certainly dissipate the anger. The story we carry about our parents shapes the story we tell about ourselves.
The families I have seen do the most meaningful work are rarely the ones who arrive with the clearest diagnosis of who the problem is. They are the ones who can stay curious long enough to ask: what happened to you, that you became this way? Where can we go from there?
It is the same question good storytelling has been asking about its villains for years.
Now can someone please write Gaston’s back story?
