Crafting an engaging movie villain can be a work of careful finesse. Whether it's balancing characters' innate human pathos with terrible actions, or weighing their irredeemable vileness with how much justice they'll receive on behalf of the audience, most villains need some kind of recognizable core of emotion that audiences can recognize and react to appropriately. The best villains always find a way to make an impression within their specific context: action/sci-fi thrillers, slashers, and animated comedies can often call for different flavors of antagonists, and should be judged accordingly.

In a time of immense social and political polarization, where incompatible worldviews define party lines, more and more people are increasingly seeing the world split between a divide of heroes an

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