I've noticed something of a trend in entertainment lately; or rather, a trend in comments ABOUT entertainment. It's something that I've seen off and on for years, but I feel like I'm seeing it more and more. I'm talking about wanting to feel vindicated against the antagonist of a story.

When someone behaves badly in a story, whether real or fictional, I will often see a comment from someone on how that bad person should have been bad to the extreme, so the audience could witness extreme justice against them. Take "The Karate Kid" as an example. (For clarification, I'm using the original with Ralph Macchio and not the remake from a couple years back.) When Danny finally lands the victory-winning blow against Johnny in the final match, Johnny congratulates him. A lot of people I know criticize this moment, saying how they wish Johnny would have continued to be mean and rude, and should have tried to take Danny down after losing out of sheer spite. Now, considering all the anger management problems Johnny's character exhibited, it might be more in-character for him to be a bad sport right after losing, but the criticism I often hear isn't because it would have been more in-line with Johnny's character; it's because the audience criticizing the ending WANTED TO SEE JOHNNY GET BEAT UP EVEN MORE.

This is the crux of my complaint here today. People want to see someone they deem as "bad" to "get what's coming to them," but they want it to be justified. They WANT to find some reason to continue feeling morally superior to someone else, whether or not they know that other individual personally or even whether or not that other individual is a real person. The truth, though, is that the people of the world aren't that black and white. You don't have this dichotomy of good vs. evil; angels vs. demons; heroes vs. villains. Everyone has their character strengths and flaws. If you parade around this fallacious ideal that some other people are just rotten to the core from birth and will never show one iota of goodness by expressing your own delight in seeing them taken down, you are actually showing YOUR true colors in how unwilling you are to connect to other people you've already dubbed as "bad." The likely truth is that you're avoiding dealing with your own inadequacies by masquerading as someone who is virtuous in comparison to someone else, but reality doesn't work that way. No matter how bad someone else is, their wrongdoings don't give you a "get out of jail free" ticket from addressing your OWN character flaws. It might make you feel better to know that you don't have the same shortcomings as someone else you deem to be "worse" than you, but it's a temporary fix at best and shallow and condescending at worst.

The bottom line is that when you see an antagonist in a story pull it back before they get into as deep trouble as possible, you should applaud their own restraint. If you're REALLY a good person, you will applaud any effort anyone gives to be a better person, no matter how small, because most of the time, such things happen in those baby steps like Johnny putting aside his own pride and anger for a moment and graciously conceding defeat to The Karate Kid.