The Appeal Of A Villain Friend In Fiction Is More Often Than Not The Thought That Someone Out There Would

The appeal of a villain friend in fiction is more often than not the thought that someone out there would choose you over the entire world.

The members of the League of Villains were anyone's priority. They felt replaceable or even worse, they knew they were replaceable. They weren't pretty enough, strong enough, normal enough, cool enough. They were wrong in the head, were too violent, too weird, too creepy.

All the rage? The hurt? They were told to swallow it because it was making people uncomfortable.

Stain was their inspiration, but he wasn't the one to pick them. He wasn't the one who looked at them and told them "you have a place". That was Giran. The manga tells us that Giran was putting together a sort of friendship group for violent outcasts like them. That he formed the League for them to have company, a reason to fight for, to exist.

There's a sort of catharsis that fictional villain friendships give that you can't find somewhere else. A sort of short-lived relief that comes when someone sees you being mistreated and decides retribution is needed. Wouldn't it be wonderful if revenge had no consequences and the damage it caused was at once lasting and non-existent?

That's what fiction is for. You put all your feelings there and create scenarios where you purge those feelings. No one gets harmed and you come out of it cleaned, renewed, with a clear head.

So when Tomura Shigaraki creates the League of Villains, it is an instant click for people who had been wronged and are seeking catharsis of their negative experiences and feelings.

The League of Villains punishes someone with torture and failure for misgendering and hurting their trans friend. A shonen manga does that, a gender where nonconforming people are a joke by tradition. Do you get what that means to some readers out there?

Tomura claims to hate everything and everyone, but when Toga asks him, he admits that they are his exception. He wouldn't destroy something they loved. His prioritizing their wishes and their likings. There was no one else above them for him and no one was as important to him as they were.

Suddenly, they are someone's number one people and not out of manipulation. They recognize in Tomura a man who really cares.

Tomura was shown to live in total neglect. He had poor hygiene, was isolated almost completely from the outside world, talked with maybe three or four people tops, ate whatever, liver whatever. He didn't care about his living conditions. It was only when the League asked for clothing and food and other stuff that he began to care. For them.

He wants them to live, to succeed, he wants to hurt anyone who hurts them, to protect what is precious to them.

And now we got confirmation that they matter more to him than his own past.

Tomura would destroy the world simply because they asked him to, because they promised to. He would destroy himself trying because he must be their hero. Remember how every time a villain would question him about his motivation or his ideals, he would talk about his hatred or his need to destroy. We've gone past it and at his very core we found that the thing that truly fuels him is the desire to be a hero.

For them.

It's really something to see people wondering why a reader would be fond of Tomura Shigaraki or the LOV in general. Is it that hard to understand?

Again, that's the appeal of a fictional villain's friendship to real life victims:

To be important, to be picked, to be prioritized, to be felt, to be seen, to be understood, to belong to and be considered, to be irreplaceable. To be all those things to the point the weight of it shatters the universe.

So much love outplacement in someone's love— to matter so much to someone —that to see you hurt would make them want to destroy the world.