"Steps" And The Humanizing Of Villains

Coming November 20 , the film stars Ali Wong as Lilith, Stephanie Hsu as Margot, Amanda Seyfried as Cinderella, and Bette Midler as the Fairy Godmother, with Amy Poehler producing. The premise is that Lilith, tired of living in Cinderella’s shadow, steals the Fairy Godmother’s wand with Margot in order to hijack the royal ball. Margot becomes a frog, the kingdom falls into the hands of another villain, and Lilith must eventually team up with Cinderella to save it. In other words: the stepsister was misunderstood. Shocker. To be fair, Steps may be a fun, catchy film. Netflix gave us KPop Demon Hunters , one of the rare recent children’s movies that understood girls still want beauty, romance, friendship, and sacrifice. Steps has different filmmakers behind it, but it may be funny, visually beautiful, and genuinely moving. The voice cast is certainly excellent. But it is hard to ignore what the movie represents. We have become culturally obsessed with humanizing the villain and increasingly bored by the “cliché” hero. It is hard to ignore what the movie represents. Cinderella was once the moral center of her own story. She remained kind without becoming weak, hopeful without becoming naïve, and good in a home where goodness was never rewarded. “Have courage and be kind” was the moral message of the live-action Cinderella . Now Cinderella’s happiness is the backdrop for someone else’s wound. Even the name Lilith, a newly introduced stepsister, is clearly chosen for a reason. Lilith is not a neutral name. In Jewish folklore, she developed into a demonic figure associated with seduction and danger to mothers and infants. Culture has since repackaged her as a feminist icon: not evil, but cunning and fun. Take an old symbol of disorder and make it hot. We have seen this revision again and again. Cruella was wounded. Maleficent was betrayed because she wasn’t invited to a birthday party. The Joker was failed by society. Lucifer became a sexy television protagonist. For years, our most celebrated shows asked us to inhabit the minds of Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, and Walter White. Many of those stories were brilliant. I loved Dexter ; it’s one of my favorite shows (and besides, he killed worse people). But what begins as an interesting exception eventually becomes the only story a culture knows how to tell. The antihero became more interesting than the hero, then cooler than the hero, and finally more likable than the hero. What begins as an interesting exception eventually becomes the only story a culture knows how to tell. Compare that with the blockbusters of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their heroes were flawed, but they were allowed to be noble. They protected the weak, ran toward danger, and sacrificed themselves. Heroism was aspirational. Even films like the first Pokémon movie changed characters like Mewtwo from being gray to black and white. The hero is the hero in the USA. In American culture, we didn’t sympathize with the villain. But that was in the late ’90s. Today, we are fluent in the therapeutic language of villains. We all have trauma, after all! You could see this instinct in the reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case . In 2023, Clancy was accused of brutally killing her three young children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, in their Massachusetts home. Her attorneys have argued that she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness and was not criminally responsible. Postpartum psychosis is real, and women suffering from it deserve serious treatment, and families deserve far better systems for recognizing psychiatric crises. But much of the public conversation seemed desperate to make Clancy the most sympathetic figure in the story. People wrote about her pain, her medication, the pressure of motherhood, and the impossible standards imposed on women. Her children sometimes seemed to become irrelevant. Think of the murderer! That is where empathy becomes morally disordered. Empathy should help us recognize another person’s humanity. It should not dissolve our ability to judge human actions or cause us to look past the people who were harmed. Empathy must be balanced with a strong sense of justice. The masculine and the feminine. This may be part of why the anniversary of September 11 seemed to resonate so intensely this year. The images felt like a bygone era: firefighters walking into the towers while everyone else ran out, police officers climbing stairwells they might never descend, and ordinary men aboard Flight 93 choosing to act after realizing they might die. Today, we instinctively search for the hidden evil beneath goodness while searching just as eagerly for the hidden innocence beneath evil. See a happy couple? They’re surely hiding issues! See, nothing is as it seems! Stories train our sympathies. They teach children whom to admire, women what to excuse, and societies what to reward. If every villain is merely a neglected heroine in need of society and people are him needing to “be better,” then accountability becomes oppression, and the victim’s suffering becomes an obstacle to someone else’s self-actualization. Redemption requires recognizing that something must be redeemed. That does not mean stories need flat characters or childish moralizing. The best stories have always understood weakness, temptation, mercy, and redemption. Christianity itself is built around the possibility that sinners can repent. But redemption requires recognizing that something must be redeemed. It requires remorse, sacrifice, and change. It is not the same as announcing that the villain was secretly right all along. Perhaps Steps will understand that difference. Perhaps Lilith and Margot will confront what they did to Cinderella rather than simply reveal that Cinderella’s happiness and the fact that the handsome prince chose her made them feel “unseen.” Perhaps it will give them a genuine redemption arc. I hope so. Girls deserve stories about mercy. But they also deserve stories about goodness, and the two cannot exist without moral clarity. We have spent years giving the villain the sharper lines, richer psychology, and sympathetic backstories while reducing the hero to a one-note loser. A culture eventually becomes what it applauds. And a culture that reserves its deepest sympathy for the person holding the knife should not be shocked when the heroes disappear from the story altogether.