Anyway, I’ve been noticing for quite a while now that practically every villain from cartoons can be somehow justified. And if you try to do that, the villain turns out not to be a full‑blown villain, but just an ordinary guy. Yes, maybe not the best person in the world, but definitely not the way they’re portrayed. So, let’s take Mother Gothel from Rapunzel.

We won’t delve into her backstory now, but in the Disney cartoon, for example, she was the first to find the flower and used it for several centuries, so, essentially it belonged to her, and you could say the queen stole it. Moreover, she plucked it rather than, say, dug it up with the root. That is, Mother Gothel used it for many centuries, didn’t age, didn’t get sick, and the queen couldn’t just sing a song to it like she did? No! She had to immediately pluck it so that it could no longer be used later. In the original fairy tale she actually made a deal with the king (who, by the way, had also stolen from the witch a plant from the garden that she herself had tended and grown!) that he could take the healing plant that grew in her garden in exchange for the child she gave birth to. So there was a deal that the king agreed to and wasn’t opposed to. Well, yes, the contract isn’t particularly fair and taking a child from its parents isn’t very good, but we also have to consider that the tale was written long ago, and back then moral principles were looser. By the way, both in the cartoon and in the fairy tale she raised Rapunzel almost like her own child. Yes, she didn’t let her go out, yes, she didn’t let her interact with people, but for her the main thing was that the girl simply survived. She could have fed her with some trash and forced her to sleep on a cold stone floor, but she didn’t do that. And in the cartoon Rapunzel even had her own pet, paints, books, chess, etc. By the way, on the day the girl escaped, Gothel went either to get a birthday present for her or to get food for her favorite dish, I can’t remember well.

Now let’s discuss Magnifico. He is the king and the main villain in the cartoon “The Sacred Wish”.

We are told that when he was a teenager his whole family perished. His greatest wish would have been to save them, but at that moment he didn’t yet possess magic and could do nothing. After such an undeniably tragic incident he decided that people shouldn’t be disappointed in their dreams, learned magic, and then, together with his wife, built a kingdom on an island. Every resident could, at the age of 18, give the king their cherished wish for safekeeping, and he could fulfill it with a small chance. After handing over their wish, a person forgets about it, so even if it isn’t fulfilled they won’t be sad because they don’t even know what they wished for. Moreover, as far as I understood, the wish is given only at the owner’s discretion and is not mandatory at all. In the country one can live absolutely free and with minimal taxes, and each year the king fulfills 15 wishes of the inhabitants, so where is he a villain?!? But when he refused to grant the wish of a certain old man, everything changed: people hated him, a group of teenagers wanted to overthrow him and take back all the wishes, etc. By the way, those teenagers had rather personal motives than purely altruistic ones, because the king didn’t want to grant the wish of just any random person, but of the heroine’s grandfather!

And do you know what he wished for?!? To play, damn it, guitar in a crowd! Why on earth would a king wish to play guitar in a crowd?!? THAT’s a perfectly doable wish – you take a guitar, go to the square and play! Instead of the heroine’s grandfather’s wish, the wish of some random woman was granted and she learned to sew beautiful dresses. And I understand why the king chose that wish and not the other. Sewing dresses will bring joy to the woman herself, to the kingdom’s residents who will wear those dresses, and to the kingdom itself, because beautiful clothing can be traded with other countries. The king, by the way, interpreted the old man’s wish as “inspire people”, which, as he thought, could mean, for example, gathering a group of rebels and overthrowing him. He explained this to the main character calmly, without shouting, just explaining. Yes, maybe some paranoid guy, but not a villain. Then the heroine decided the king was a villain and told him something like “either fulfill all wishes or return them to their owners”, which infuriated the king and he said that, since that’s the case, he will not fulfill not only the old man’s wish but also the mother’s. Yes, it’s unfair, but we don’t know what her mother wished for. She could have asked, for example, to resurrect her husband, and we have no idea what would happen if that occurred. Maybe an uprising of the dead, a zombie apocalypse, the whole world dying, and then the king would be to blame because those wishes shouldn’t have been granted.

Later the heroine wished for some little star and became a sorceress herself. The king took this as betrayal, but didn’t know who exactly became the mage and decided to hunt down that person, which he sang about in a song. And do you know what else was in that song? “There’s a traitor in the city, a snake on the chest, but I’ll ask and let go, everything will be fixed – no complaints!” Of course, that’s exactly how terrible villains sing! By the way, when he told the people that there was another mage in the kingdom, they started asking stupid or off‑topic questions, which greatly angered him and he essentially snapped, reading a book on dark magic that drove him mad and made him start absorbing people’s wishes. After that he became a villain, but it wasn’t on purpose, it was dark magic. He’s also criticized for thinking he’s handsome. But that’s stupid! I also think I’m beautiful, does that instantly make me a villain? That’s just healthy self‑esteem and I see nothing wrong with it. On the plus side you could also note that he loved his wife very much. Yes, that doesn’t affect the country, but typical “villains” usually don’t care about anyone in particular.

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I Defend Villains from Cartoons and Fairy Tales. Part 1. Mother Gothel; Magnifico.