I had the distinct pleasure of watching the 1991 film "White Fang" based on Jack London’s novel with my two little cousins, one age six and the other age 11, earlier this summer. About 20 minutes in, both of them had already asked, “Is that the bad guy?,” of every single character that spoke on screen. While this was endearingly annoying, it also sparked a question inside me: “Why do we categorize fictional characters into ‘good’ or ‘bad?'” The answer is, of course, that storytellers try their best to keep things simple and organized, especially in a fictional story meant to be understood by the minds of a six- and 11-year-old. But if we travel into more intense and mature literature as readers and writers, we begin to see that not all is so simple. Genres pop up with new literary concepts such as “antiheroes” (shoutout to John Gardner and his retelling of "Beowulf" through the eyes of Grendel) and classic characters that we all at one point find ourselves loving to hate (cough, Daisy Buchanan, cough). All of this is to say that when we grow older and become surrounded by such stories, we start to see that those pages and the characters within them are not always as black and white as they once seemed.

And thankfully, lessons from literature don’t simply stay on the page…they bleed into our very lives. J.K. Rowling’s Sirius Black once said to Harry Potter, “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. There’s both light and dark in us.” People are not simple. As much as we strive to have simple lifestyles, we have depths to us that would make the ocean wonder. We are more complex than the constellations and more beautiful than the stars in them. We have the capacity to be villains of our own stories if we choose. We are all, at some level, misunderstood and cowardly and terrible. We can all be mean and selfish and negative. But that doesn’t make us all bad. Y.A. author and internet creator John Green once defined dehumanization as not only when we ignore macro-level differences (like injustices between minorities and such) but also when we imagine people in our personal lives as less complex than ourselves. We all have bad days and we all have good ones. We all have opportunities to be jerks and fart-bags, and we all have opportunities to be kind and loving people. We all have choices. With that being said, I’m not saying that when we imagine people complexly, we should let them off the hook for being jerks and fart-bags. I’m saying that we should all strive to understand each other as the vast universes that we are. The villains in our favorite stories aren’t just the “bad guys.” They’re just guys. Humans. And that alone makes them both bad…and good. Complex. Just like us.