Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5085906-20130627191357/@comment-1672596-20150724173247

Bluerock wrote: Weedle McHairybug wrote: @Bluerock: I mentioned that MGS4 effectively treated Big Boss as being a good guy because they effectively were stating that he is one. If they wanted him to be bad, they would have treated him in the game, like what the games treated the Patriots, Volgin, Coldman, and the like, and for out of series games, how Kefka, Albert Wesker, and Dr. Weil were depicted (ie, framed in the absolute worst light possible, no redeemable actions or sympathy-inducing moments, a complete monster through and through). At best, MGS4 portrayed Big Boss as a lesser of two evils when compared with the Patriots, but if you saw him as a "good guy," then that's your opinion. This kind of simplistic thinking led to ridiculous ideas such as Big Boss being "the true hero of the series." Please. Ether101 also felt the same way about Big Boss being treated as a "good guy," and he actually hated that about MGS4.

And quite frankly, that's not "simplistic," that's actually following the standards of villainy there. Don't forget that the Marquis de Sade said "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.", which effectively meant he was not only fully aware of how evil he was, but even embraced it. Besides, there are plenty of villains who are well-rounded without going into shades of gray, like the Joker, or Emperor Palpatine, or Kefka Palazzo. Even Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII was made a pure villain when he fell from grace instead of a kinda-good/kinda-evil kind of guy, and this is despite Final Fantasy VII dealing with a lot of grays, and don't get me started on many of the villains from the Matrix. Actually, trying to "humanize" villains by giving them grays actually has a huge tendency to backfire and make them more like good guys instead of actual villains, like what happened to Maleficent in the Maleficent movie.