The Villain Will Always Be the Villain if the Hero Keeps Telling the Story

 History is a stage, and every tale needs its actors. There’s the hero, noble and true, the one who vanquishes evil and restores order. And then there’s the villain—the shadow in the background, painted with broad strokes of cruelty and greed. It’s a story we know so well, it slips into our minds without resistance. But what if we’ve only ever heard one side?

What if the villain was just the hero of a story that never got told?

The hero speaks with the weight of righteousness, their words resonating in our ears. “I did what was right,” they say, and we believe them. After all, isn’t that what heroes do? But the villain—their voice is always distant, distorted by the lens of someone else’s perspective. Their truth is buried beneath layers of someone else’s narrative, reduced to a caricature of malice.

“They were cruel.”

“They betrayed us.”

“They deserved what they got.”

But did they?

The hero never tells you about the villain’s childhood. They won’t describe the nights spent shivering under a leaky roof, or the endless hunger that gnawed at their stomach like a relentless beast. They won’t mention the betrayal that came not from the villain, but to them—the moment they learned that love could be conditional, fleeting, sharp.

The hero doesn’t see the broken pieces of the villain’s heart because they’ve never looked.

Instead, they’ll recount their own struggles, their own scars, their own rise to greatness. They’ll tell you about the dragons they’ve slain and the wars they’ve won, and you’ll cheer for them. Because who wouldn’t want to believe in a hero? Who wouldn’t want to see the world in black and white, where good always triumphs and evil always falls?

But the villain—they live in the gray.

They carry the weight of decisions made in desperation, choices that seemed like survival but looked like betrayal. Maybe they raised the sword first, but only because the hero had already drawn theirs. Maybe they built their empire, not out of greed, but because the world had left them with nothing else.

The villain will always be the villain if the hero keeps telling the story, because the hero writes in ink that stains.

And what if the hero isn’t so heroic after all? What if their purity is just a sheen, polished by the privilege of power? What if their victories were born from someone else’s loss, their triumphs built on the ruins of lives they deemed unworthy?

But we don’t ask these questions, do we? We sit in the audience, applauding the hero, booing the villain, never wondering if we’ve been played.

Every hero is a villain in someone else’s story.

It’s easy to forget that when you’re fed only one perspective. But imagine, for a moment, the villain’s voice breaking through the noise: “I was protecting what I loved.”

“I fought because I had to.”

“I wanted to be free.”

Does that sound so different from the hero’s battle cry?

Perhaps the villain isn’t a villain at all. Perhaps they’re just the one brave enough to stand against the tide, to question the hero’s righteousness, to reject a world that demands obedience. Maybe they wear the label of “villain” because it’s easier than trying to change a story already written.

And maybe, just maybe, the hero fears them. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re a mirror—a reflection of everything the hero doesn’t want to see.

The villain will always be the villain if the hero keeps telling the story. But what happens when the villain takes the pen? When they show you the cracks in the hero’s armor, the blood on their hands, the truth hidden behind their smile?

Maybe then we’ll see that the line between hero and villain was never so clear. Maybe then we’ll understand that we all carry a little of both within us.

And maybe then, we’ll stop looking for heroes and start listening to every story.