On the benefits of the mustache-twirling villain

Note: This is going to include spoilers for Blood of a Fae by Briar Boleyn, and for Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. You've been warned.

As I'm reading the Blood of a Fae series and currently fairly early in book two, it occurred to me that outside of our love interest, there's very little in the way of shades of moral gray. It's very much a world where the bad guys are sadistic evil bastards and the good guys are their antithesis in every conceivable way. This occurred to me because I know one character I'm already just waiting to see die. I don't have many hopes for her to be redeemed. This author excels at making horrible villains who you're excited to see die, and then excels at the payoff. It's like a slasher movie without the horror.

Right on the heels of this thought, I was listening to Fourth Wing on my commute home, and Jack Barlow died horribly. Fourth Wing excels at making villains you hate, but up until this point, most of them hadn't had that payoff. I was so glad when Jack died. When Violet called down lightning and struck him to the ground in an avalanche of boulders so that he could be crushed to death in case he hadn't been electrocuted or burned to death already.

I wondered for a minute if I should be bothered by this. By the lack of ambiguity in the morality of all the characters, of the world itself.

Then I decided, not even a little.

This, I've decided, is not a flaw in the books. This is a feature. This is part of the fantasy--not fantasy as in the genre, but fantasy as in a dream. The fantasy of this world is that the bad guys are easy to identify. The fantasy is the mustache-twirling villain telling you their plans while you watch the clock tick down to absolute destruction, knowing that the hero will win in the end. Because in the real world, bad people do good things. Good people do bad things. In the real world, there are no perfect heroes and very few diabolical villains. The real life analogs of Vesper aren't nice enough to drug you, push you into a lake, and then posture with a garotte to strangle your protector so that you can know exactly who you're dealing with and fall out of love with them in a heartbeat before disintegrating them in another. And in the real world, you can't disintegrate them or call down lightning to collapse a mountain under them. You're usually just stuck knowing they're out there and will probably hurt you or someone else later on.

Suffice to say, it's comforting sometimes to escape to a world where the bad guys and good guys are very clear.