When I was younger, I had a secret. I didn’t tell the people around me, because I thought they would judge me.  But I’m not so young anymore.

My secret? When I watched movies and TV shows, I was secretly rooting for the bad guys.

I started out just like any other kid, marveling at the prowess of the heroes on my screen, but then it started to dawn on me. They always win. Always. And that became very, very boring.

I didn’t stop watching. Instead, I started to focus on the story of the bad guys.

It all started with Power Rangers. I know, unless you were part of my generation, you probably think that’s pretty lame. (And if you’re from my generation, that using the word lame, is itself pretty lame). But for me, the Power Rangers taught me to love villainy. I absolutely loved Rita Repulsa. You know, the one with the amazing cackling laugh, the horned hairdo and the staff that let her summon minions out of thin air.

Repulsive as Rita may sound to you, she embodied the ‘never give up’ spirit that any good villain should have. Most of her plans weren’t half bad, and she obeyed the cardinal rule of common sense, a rule that no hero ever seems to follow. Don’t put yourself in harm's way. A good thing too, because unlike the heroes of the story, villains in these stories seem to die off pretty quickly.

It was just so unfair. No matter what the villains did, they never really stood a chance. Without good or just reasoning, the hero always wins. I don’t know about you, but I like to root for the underdog, and to me, that includes the guy who loses even if he overwhelms his opponent on every metric possible, except plot armor.

Power Rangers aside, there are plenty of examples of this happening in contemporary storytelling. Look at Star Wars. The Death Star is the biggest most powerful structure ever created, manned by some of the finest soldiers in the galaxy, but not a single one of them can apparently aim and worse the entire thing can be destroyed by a well aimed shot down the exhaust port. Has anyone in this universe ever heard of a grill? Pretty standard feature in any kind of venting system.

And while we’re talking about vents, what about Die Hard? The name is essentially a celebration of the fact that the hero can’t die, despite throwing himself into one crazy situation after another. If this were reality, Bruce Willis’ character would have probably just fallen to his death in that massive vent system, chopped to pieces by a giant fan, and in the process, one of the greatest villains to have ever lived would have achieved his perfectly planned out heist. (Hans, wubby..  call me?)

This all got me thinking. This wasn’t right. After all, nothing is as black and white as the movies would have us believe, so why should we all just go along with it? There was more to these villains than they were ever given credit for, and I wanted to prove it. This lead to the.. episode.

One day, while playing with my toys, I picked up a super man action figure, and I decided it was time to put his invulnerability to the test. When my parents found me, superman cut, drilled, burned and finally being stretched by the multiple wires I’d attached to him, mum and dad decided that I should probably get counselling.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Doctor Pearson was a dolt. He tried, he really did. But we had a difference of opinion that, because of my age, apparently meant I had a problem. I didn’t tell him I disagreed with him though, even at the ripe age of seven, I knew I needed to keep my true feelings to myself. So I played along.  

The Doctor even gave me the rorschach test. You know, the ink blots?

Well, my dad was a boy scout, and he loved the organisation’s founder, Lord Baden-Powell. Dad had this story he used to tell about the great Baden-Powell. He said that, when he was scouting and reconnoitering enemy positions, he would travel pretending to be a butterfly collector, and as he did so he would disguise plans of military installations by drawing them into the wings of butterflies.

For me, the rorschach test showed those butterflies, filled with devious strategies for my own evil plots. Though if you were to ask Doctor Pearson, all I saw were the butterflies.

It wasn’t long before the entire episode was forgotten. But I learned my lesson, not to reveal myself to anyone. Like Mr Brown in the Secret Adversary, I needed to stay in the shadows and make everyone think I was just a nice guy.

This wasn’t hard, because after all it wasn’t like I was all that different. I just had a philosophical difference with the rest of the world. I was a pretty normal kid, I was not unusually scrawny, I had a bowl cut (thanks mum), brown hair, blue eyes, a smattering of freckles, I had a healthy taste for sports and I watched quite a lot of TV, as you may have guessed.

While I always knew I wanted to be the bad guy, it wasn’t something I could ever achieve without serious consequences. It wasn’t until High School that I really started to formulate a plan that would let me become the kind of villain you read about in stories.

It was in high school I discovered online gaming, through the glorious portal of my aunt’s second-hand laptop. An anonymous outlet for my rage against the protagonists. I PK’d, I spawn camped, I trolled, I told people the fix to their problem was to press Alt + F4 (Go on, I'll wait..).  And for a time is was glorious, but it always came to an end. The games didn’t have any consequences, and I would go to school the next morning, no better off but for the knowledge of my misdeeds.

It was only last year that this all changed for me. Last year, at the plump age of 35, I found the right game for me. A virtual reality permadeath MMO, with a unique magic system, where the rewards for my guile could pay not only the cost of the game, but for me to live like a king. An enticing deal, as I had been torn whether to go back to living with my parents, or working a dead-end job that only increased my desire to do evil deeds.

Why was this game so rewarding? The permadeath mechanic meant that when your character dies, you lose it all. Everything you had on you, lost, everything tied to your character, lost. Sure, you could bury your stuff in a hole, but someone could always come along and dig it up.

This meant players were always buying new items, expensive ones that were meant to keep them alive. So if I could just relieve enough players of their expensive items, then I could sell them in the market and make rent.

However, this wasn’t what initially attracted me to the game. The real attraction was the unique magic system. AI controlled, each player’s magic system works differently. Meaning there are no guides online on how to cast x or y spell or enchantment, because one wizards killing curse could just as easily be another’s self immolation. 

This means that anyone who wanted to play the game, had to put the time into learning their craft, mastering innate abilities, and do it all without dying. Because the moment they lost their character, they’d have to learn everything from scratch. These were the kind of consequences I could get behind, the recipe to leveling the playing field, and the sundering of plot armor.