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Not friendly at all reminder that “you have to learn that not every person can be saved” is a garbage moral.
You, personally, are not obligated to save everyone you meet. But “some people just inherently cannot be saved, by you, themselves, or anyone” is garbage.
Can we please stop acting like pure evil irredeemable villains are novel or interesting. They’re not. They’re literally the norm, and they’re frequently absurd grotesque caricatures, often of mentally ill people and often of people who have experienced trauma.
I feel like I cannot make a post of any kind of even vaguely sympathetic read on any antagonistic character without at least one person jumping on the post like “but Clockie, can’t we just have someone with no morals, qualms, or sad backstory that we can just hate and watch the heroes demean and attack without any remorse?”
I really absolutely promise it is possible to feel bad for someone and want them to do better without justifying all of their behavior. It is actually completely possible to hold “you sure did kill that guy” and “you sure are coming from an awful place that hurt you a lot” at the same time without one devaluing the other.
It’s also guaranteed that, even if you write a character to be Evil McOneDimension, there’s bound to be someone out there who will feel empathy for them and want to flesh them out, especially if they end up sharing certain traits with the villain. A lot of the time, villains who are held up as examples of Everything Wrong with the World tend to also be given traits that the writer sees as undesirable, whether that’s mental illness (disorders involving low empathy and/or personality disorders are popular for Pure Evil villains) queer coding, gender nonconformity, physical deformities/disability, nonwhiteness, etc. For a fan from one of these “unlovable” groups, sometimes there’s an urge to try to humanize such characters by fleshing them out, almost out of spite for the writer’s unconscious biases.
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