Loy Young

As our junior heroine embarks on his journey to triumph over evil, she often  mistakes an unbalanced hero for a villain. It is often hard to tell the difference because most heroes are strong and when they are out of control prone to domineer others, just like villains. Their overwhelming strength may wreck havoc and hurt those who are weaker.

The difference between such a hero and a villain lies in the intention.

The hero is genuinely trying to help, but in such a forceful way that people get hurt nevertheless. Probably one of the greatest analogies is an over controlling parent who wants to protect a child but behaves in a negative way.

Leaders of Groups and Organizations

Similarly, leaders of organizations are oftentimes so forceful that they squash other people’s initiatives. A forceful leader may at best turn people into implementers of their orders. Initially such a leadership may even work for our junior heroes, as part of their apprenticeship.

However, as soon as our junior heroes’ strength and mind begin to expand, they begin to see their own solutions and want to take independent action, which are foiled by the forceful leader with
"if you did what I told you, it would work.  We don’t need a new approach, I just need you to follow my instructions."

The positive path

Some junior heroines will be grateful for what they have learned and move on, set up their own organization, and test their own methods. But eventually she will run into the same problems as the leader of the group she has left behind, and will develop empathy for him. This is a positive path of moving from junior to senior hero.

You can also liken this path to the development of the child who becomes a  young adult, leaves home and has his own family. Only as a parent himself can he begin to have empathy and understanding for his parent.

A built-in trap

If our junior heroine doesn’t have the courage to start his own group when she has become too strong to be just an implementer and found there was no room for co-leadership,  she will start to turn our well-meaning, overly strong hero into a villain. Now she will need to rally others to overthrow the leader so that goodness can triumph over evil.

The junior heroine now blames the leader for betraying her when she was still a gullible, good person who has now discovered his real, wicked nature. She then sets out to triumph over the person, exposing all his evil or so she thinks.

Certainly, the leader probably misused power, being too demanding.  Or misusing love to make people feel far more special than they were. But still, as long as the leader did not intend to hurt the people in his group, he is a negative hero mistaken for a villain. It’s a big difference.

After forcing the old leader off-stage with blame, criticism and hate, our junior hero turned senior heroine often becomes the new leader of the group. Yet, as there was no positive passion in the triumph, the new leader will not fare any better. The same fate awaits her.

Our heroine mistook the negative patterns of the old leader for the characteristics of a villain. This triumph over a forceful hero often becomes a trap, leading her to think she just triumphed over one villain.  And she’ll try her same methods to triumph over real villains.

She doesn’t understand that her victory was made possible only by the shame and remorse of the old leader. A real villain would not feel the same and thus would vanquish our junior heroine. Even when she looks like a winner she could shortly be knifed in the back, without even realizing why if she lived. Real villains do not value life, but do find thrills in killing.