"There are two sides to every coin." And in the same way, the story you know may not be the whole story. You may be surprised to find out that what you thought you knew by heart wasn't the entire truth all along.
As a little girl who grew up close to her father, I became fond of using the computer. I would often watch my father and brother play all kinds of games until I, myself, eventually started playing too. And what I always took note of, wasn't just the gameplay (though of course I also took note of that) but more especially the story plot. After all, I loved books first before I even developed an inkling for games. It was fun, and I was entertained by the backstories of the characters in games. It was like a whole new world was opening up to me.
Backstories are very interesting. There, I found out that the bad guys weren't always so bad and that the good guys don't always make the best decisions. That nice characters sometimes started out rude but learned along the way, while characters with attitudes became that way because of certain experiences in their past. All kinds of things you wouldn't be able to tell at first glance of the story, or by just reading the main canons. Villains or Heroes, we can't really judge them based solely on what we see or what we hear. After all, it may all turn out to be just a facade. Have you ever stopped to wonder that? About why they do the things they do? Have you ever given them any benefit of the doubt? Or did you already seal their fate the moment they were placed into their different roles? Because maybe, just maybe, that person you thought was the villain of the story wasn't so evil after all.
I have always tried to see beyond what is shown. Not that I claim to be good at it or anything, but I think it is a nice practice, trying to figure out why people are the way they are. I get that humans are difficult to understand, and some people would even say they have trouble understanding themselves, and adding more to that would be overkill. But if nobody makes the effort to do that, to try to understand each other, even just a bit of what each other is going through, wouldn't society just crash over then? We all have some selfishness ingrained into our nature, some more than most, but in the same way, we also all have the capacity to love and care.
For instance, I had this friend who was a tad selfish, that a lot of our other friends would talk behind her back. I listened to them, but I tried not to push out judgments of my own. I tell you it was difficult, because sometimes she would get even on my nerves. Now, we could just brand her as the selfish friend, like most people would, or we could look deeper and see why she became that way. And guess what? Actually, that friend of mine was an adopted child. Someone who never knew her parents, and while the family that took her in do take care of her and send her to school, but in exchange, she would work for her sister, like doing dishes, cleaning the house, laundry, all those things you usually have maids do. And she lived so far away from school, having to commute from miles and miles away while other from that distance would usually stay in dorms. She did try to stay in a dorm once, but after she was cut out of her part-time job, she had to return back home and commute again. Now, a person going through all those things would indeed want some attention to herself right? Some concern, some distinction. And well, I guess, the only thing is, she went about it wrongly, pretty much like how some villains in stories have good intentions, but are executing their plans in the wrong way.
This is the case with any story. In their quest for something that by all nature isn't bad, it isn't uncommon for someone to make a mistake, and the mistakes they make may be so large-scale like in movies or stories where they are damaging the world, or maybe small-scale where they incur the backlashes of some people. But we are never limited to being just a villain or a side-character. We aren't limited to what other perceive us to be. In each other's life, we are our own characters. We can be a sidekick to one, or just an NPC in another, or maybe even the love interest for someone. And more than that, we all have backstories, and there in our own stories, we are the heroes. And these stories are the testimonies to who we really are and what more we can be.
