This summer, Netflix will release Steps, which critics are calling a fresh look at the Cinderella story.

The evil stepsisters are now kind, misunderstood, and unfairly judged.

Is it just me or is something strange going on with how we create or reimagine our movie villains. It feels like for the last 20 years,

movies have turned into a parade of rehabilitated sociopaths. We even have marketing firms

and consultants who tell studios exactly what characteristics will make a villain most attractive.

It's a tragic backstory,

scores at 76%, followed closely by childhood trauma at 67%, and misunderstood motives at 61%.

Like Thanos, sympathetic villains have become inevitable. Increasingly, we're not even excusing or explaining bad behavior.

We're just celebrating our villains.

With a quick search, you can find thousands of fandom pages and online communities

that celebrate not great deeds or noble heroes, but the very worst in us.

We have memes for adults who identify more with their childhood villains than their childhood princesses. As one adult Disney fan put it,

I looked at the bad guy and thought, wait a minute, that's me as hell. It's a twisted nostalgia

where adult fans have come to identify authenticity,

living freely, and fulfillment with lying, theft, and mass murder. How did we get stuck in this

endless loop of rehashing our childhood villains? Have we, as one film critic put it, made a societal lurch

in the direction of fairness because of our evolved principles? Or is there something much

darker going on? The list is endless, so I'll start with a few stunners.

The misunderstood outcast scar from Mufasa, no longer a fratricidal sociopath with fascist

aspirations.

Now he's the Prince Harry to Mufasa's Prince William, the sad spare.

In the Wicked franchise we get Elphaba, once the symbol of

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