Taking over the world is overrated

[selenak]

In some of the Jessica Jones reviews and comments that I've spotted, I've seen the complaint re: our main villain's lack of ambition. Which to me was one of the refreshing elements of the show. And in this particular case, it made so much sense. After all, why should Kilgrave want to take over the city/country/planet? What could he possibly gain that he doesn't already have?

We're so used to supervillains wanting to rule that we've stopped questioning why they should want to. Jessica Jones has a villain with an ability that already ensures his every whim is catered to. He's not lacking in any material thing he could want, he can use people in any way he wants to, and seriously, governing the city/country/world is work, even if you're doing it badly.

Villains who want to take over usually want to change something. No matter whether they're Evil McEvil villains who want to create a wasteland or Utopians gone wrong who want to create a new, better society with casualties, they're not content with the world as it is. Whereas Kilgrave is fine with the world as it is, minus the part where he can't control Jessica anymore which isn't something domination of a territory would change.

Part of what makes this series so good to me is that this doesn't make Kilgrave any less damaging than villains who sic superweapons on people. Throughout the season, we see the lives he's harmed or taken, and that's what's at stake in Jessica's quest to defeat him. It's not solely a matter of Jessica's own life, or that of her immediate circle; we've seen both in cameos and supporting characters taking up more narrative space the wreckage Kilgrave leaves after him. And to me, this meant the emotional stakes as a viewer were higher, not lower, than if the show had presented a conventionally ambitious villain intent on becoming Lord Mcoverlord the Third.

Comments

[liviapenn]

Well, definitely agreed on just the character level-- why *should* Kilgrave be interested in some kind of formal position of power? He can get all the perks of power just by asking for them. He shows by episode 5 that he doesn't even always have to use his powers, he can easily get the money to hire people to protect and/or serve him without trying very hard. So why bother getting elected mayor or whatever? A villain like Wilson Fisk wants to control people because supposedly he cares what happens to them. But Kilgrave doesn't care about people in general, so he has no plans to lead them or protect them or even kill them in large numbers.

On the other hand, compared to Daredevil, I think Jessica Jones has a weaker overall story, and doesn't hang together as well, precisely because they hang back on revealing Kilgrave's *actual* goal for so long -- to court Jessica into being a willing participant in a relationship. It makes it hard for Jessica to have the usual protagonist story of "frustrate the bad guy's goals" if she doesn't know what they are until over halfway through the series. She has kind of a secondary goal of "save Hope by proving Kilgrave's powers are real" but honestly it *was* hard for me to get emotionally invested in *that* plan because it was just so totally flawed and impossible. Jessica herself was the one who kept saying that people/"the system" were super invested in *not* believing in weird powers, and that's with something as easily understandable and demonstrable and relatively normal as super-strength, so I'm not sure how she thought her tape would be proof of anything to a naive viewer except "I kidnapped this guy and tortured him until he played along with my fake scenario about his psychic powers."

Jessica's *real* goal, to kill Kilgrave, isn't even a thing until Hope's death. In retrospect a lot of things before that just kind of feel like spinning wheels. I think the show would have been better if Kilgrave hadn't come in till later, maybe 1/3 or even 1/2 of the way through, or else moved a *lot* more quickly to the double reveal that his plan is to win Jessica's willing participation in a relationship & that he only wants this because he can't actually control her any more, and if Jessica had openly faced the fact a lot earlier on that, like everyone was telling her, it would actually be easy to just snipe Kilgrave from a rooftop and maybe you should just do that.

[wee_warrior]

Still not reading after the cut (Have watched up to and including ep 6), but that seems like such a weird complaint. I think that Kilgrave works so well as a villain because his brand of evil is close enough to our mundane life that it could actually happen (sans superpowers, obviously) - I'd worry more about meeting someone like him than a destructive emo goth god with Daddy Issues. And even the issues the X-Men have to face are still a bit larger-than-life, metaphorical as they might be otherwise.

[selenak]

Quite. A bit like the Trio in Buffy's sixth season in that they were a deliberate counterpoint to the larger than life villains that came before, and were recognizable not just to Buffy but the audience as people they went to school with.

[deltatell1942.livejournal.com]

That's something I always liked about Dr. Horrible. He's clearly only bent on ruling the world because he feels like he should, and in one of the songs he says something like, "I'm going to fix the world by ... well, I'll figure it out."