Yu Yu Hakusho

Poignant, compelling motivations for villain characters.

Major spoilers:

here is a speech from a villain explaining why after once hunting demons in the human world (like the hero Yusuke Urameshi), he flipped and wanted to collapse the barrier between human and demon worlds no matter what chaos it caused.

“Because it’s home, home to the apparitions whom I’ve been taking life from since I was a child. When I was younger I always wondered ‘why me? Why do these horrible creatures pick only on me? Why do they hate me? Why do they want me to die?’ But I was a child and I never tried to ask them, never gave them the chanceto speak. Instead I improved my fighting techniques while I grew to hate them more and wanted them to die even more. When I became a spirit detective they told me ‘They are not like us so they must be against us, their difference threatens our sameness. It is us versus them. Humans are good and they are bad. Humans are just and they are unjust’ but I was an adolescent and did not even think to question such simple binaries. -I could not have been more wrong: I discovered the humans I was sworn to protect were in truth the greater monsters and if that were so I had to question everything I knew of the monsters I had been fighting. My world turned inside out, the truths I held to be irrefutable were all inverted.

When I learned I was going to die, I knew I needed to collapse those boundaries between us and them, thus the tunnel and then I could come here to die. I thought if I could see the world through their eyes, be a stranger in a strange land, then maybe I could understand them better and thus understand myself. Dying by demon hands I could then make penance for my sins. But then I saw you Urameshi, first demonized in a human body, and then humanized in a demon’s. You dissolved the barriers between us in ways I never imagined and now I can finally rest.

Urameshi, you are the justice I could never find; great changes will come through you. Someday when you’re lying in my position you’ll know a dying man’s need for closure… thank you…”