Why We Tell Stories Part 7: Entanglements with Evil

Few things are more amusing in these douyin dramas than when the villains usually of the female Green Tea variety wail with crocodile tears streaming down their cheeks, trying to weasel their way out of a major reveal or showdown. “I didn’t mean to” (我不是故意的) or “I didn’t do it on purpose”. Nobody wants to go to jail. Particularly when they have spent the better part of an entire drama plotting and scheming against the leads with exhausting resolve. Kidnapping is a perennial favourite. Guaranteed to be on the menu. Hit and runs. Aphrodisiacs. Drugging. Poisoning. Stealing newborns. Holding elderly relatives hostage. Faking medical reports. Faking illnesses. Faking pregnancy. Faking paternity reports. Torture. Arson. Stabbing. Extortion. And of course we can’t forget murder most foul. It’s all par for the course in the villain’s bag of tricks. Even more shameless and eye-rolling inducing are the words 我做了这些因为我太爱你 “I did all these because I love you too much.”

It’s laughable but that’s the way evil thinks. It takes what is good and corrupts it or inverts it. Macbeth came to mind the other day and the well-known lines uttered by the witches came to mind. “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Inside the headspace of evil’s stooges, it’s all up side down. Needless to say these inversion can and does happen in the name of love and compassion.

Evil seldom thinks it’s evil. It may see itself as an “alternative”. Or even as agents on the right side of history. It’s true that scarcely any bad actors ever thinks of themselves as scoundrels. That is a label they attribute to others who get in their way. The villains in a crisis driven douyin drama keep themselves busy not because they think of themselves as the handmaidens of evil but because they perceive themselves as victims of unfairness or inequality. The attitude breeds an environment of moral relativism which leads to chaos. In their mind it justifies all the backstabbing and the deception. It’s fine to resort to all kinds of horrors to achieve one’s goals because eggs have to broken to make omelettes. With this kind of moral compass, lying and stealing are quite acceptable because the world is unfair. When things don’t go their way, the end justifies the means. It’s the stuff of dystopian visions. The New Testament calls the devil or Satan the Father of lies. While he appears as angel of light, his modus operandi, as stated in the Gospels, is to steal, kill and destroy.

In a douyin drama it’s often rich people with an insatiable appetite for power fighting among themselves. The book of James in the New Testament sums up every drama succinctly with this simple observation: “… your passions area at war within you… You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.” The female villain, often referred to as the Green Tea 绿茶 (a scheming woman who appears to be virtuous) isn’t “in love” with the male protagonist as much as she’s in love with being his wife — the woman hanging off his arm at all the big social events where all the prominent families gather to parade their wares. She will fight tooth and nail to stay on top of the food chain. Proof of that is her propensity to blame the female protagonist for “seducing” the male lead. The language that’s used is indicative. She directs her ire entirely at her rival as a primary impediment but not at the man who rejects her unequivocally. Scorned by the one she has invested in for so long she goes after the female lead and her children if she has any. The villain’s obsession is with the status and the power that the male lead brings. On the other hand the protagonist (usually a Cinderella type) wants love from the ML unmixed and wholehearted. The two women are positioned on two moral fronts. One personifies love. The other represents the expedient grab for power. That’s why the female lead often gives up or relinquishes her blossoming relationship with the male lead if she’s insecure about his intentions. She demands complete devotion from her suitor. This gives her rivals in love the upper hand because the Green Tea is willing to do anything to snatch the prize including sowing discord. Cinderella is often in a battleground for which she is unprepared to fight and she’s unwilling to deploy the weapons at her disposal so it’s up to others to act on her behalf to wrap up the final resolution. She may be keen to fight for her stuff — inheritance, her mother’s company, birthright — but strangely passive where love is concerned. She’s almost offended that the father of her children would ask to marry her unless she is certain that he is in love with her first.

A good example of this is a drama about two identical twin sisters representing good on one side and evil. One sister sleeps with a guy one night because she needs an antidote. She runs off and later has his children. A set of quadruplets in fact. Evil twin attempts fratricide takes off with two babies to present to the man her sister bedded as bargaining power. The children are used as leverage to get close to the richest man in the land but for six years he remains aloof due to some inexplicable revulsion he has towards 99.9% of women. The CEO male lead is a well-written character. He comes across as a normal human beings with more common sense than many of his douyin counterparts. Rather than relying on others to tell him what to think, he uses his own judgment after observing the situation. The Green Tea has no real hold on him because he deals in mainly facts and logic not emotions. He tolerates her (barely) because he believes she is the mother of his children. He grudgingly wears the moniker of being the Green Tea’s fiance for their sake. Eventually he joins the dots on his own even as he’s drip fed information about the female lead. Our female lead is attracted to him quite early on. As she says he’s good-looking, rich and even his vocal delivery sounds good (he does). Despite all that and finding out that he’s the father of her children, she resists the urge to jump into his arms because she wants love not obligation based on a “mistake” made years earlier .

The male villain is often an unfaithful/womanizing scumbag (渣男) — an adulterer and a thief. He is usually in league with the Green Tea. In rebirth stories he plots and schemes with the woman closest to the female lead while romancing both of them. If he’s a relative of the male lead, he tends to initiate a power struggle often with the aid of his mother or father. His goal is always to gain control of the family business and become the head of the family. He is rarely repentant and rails on about the injustice of not being the successor because his talents/abilities are not being acknowledged. At their core the “villains” have some kind of inferiority complex and have an overinflated view of themselves or of their own importance. The lie they tell themselves is that anyone can be the master of the group and they have “missed out” because of favouritism. He may be patient or he’s inclined to take short cuts. Aphrodisiacs are a popular tool with which to force somebody’s hand especially when the villains are in a hurry. That kind of high risk maneuver tends to backfire badly especially when the leads are the ones reaping the benefits.

It’s greed undoubtedly that driving a lot of the angst and outrage masquerading as victimhood. For us plebs it’s hard to drum up any kind of sympathy for people who already have far more than most of us will see in a lifetime. These people deal in millions and billions. Having plenty apparently doesn’t bring contentment but may in fact arouse envy. Some people just have to have more. At the end of the day, these are morality tales meant to instruct. The insanity is meant to make things more memorable — greed is not good.

The imposter is a perpetual feature of these stories. Evil is not only a distortion of the good but a counterfeit of the real. The villain (male or female) is in a real enough way a grifter or a hustler. Cinderella which represents all that is good and true is set up in contrast to the step-mother and sister who can only be imitators because everything they possess when the story begins isn’t theirs to begin with. The step-mother is almost always the fake, often the former mistress of the father who usurps the wife-mother role with some wicked deed. She acts actively against Cinderella to elevate her preferred successor — her own daughter — to exercise control and maintain her position in her own fiefdom. Occasionally the villain isn’t a relative of the leads but a baby swap or a plant for vested interests. A wolf in sheep skin.

So the take back/revenge by the leads is almost always about house cleaning. The goal is to get back everything that was theirs but in reality it’s about saving the family from the worst of evil and cleanse any trace of their grubby fingerprints plastered all over the furniture.