Melissa Reddick

Day 60! Woohoo!

What a milestone! 61 days of journaling prompts complete already! (Remember, we started at Day 0? Not Day 1.)

I am slightly remiss that I am posting this one a few hours into the morning on 8/30/26, when it was supposed to be posted on 8/29/26. I apologize to all of you who are reading these prompts in real time. Hopefully I left you enough context clues in yesterday’s post that you could carry on without me if you wanted to keep your regular schedule, or you made up your own prompt in the meantime. I don’t expect to make this a habit. Thank you for not giving up on me because of one little slip up like this.

For those who are not reading in real time, welcome back for another day!

As I mentioned yesterday, today is our last day of focusing on heroes in the way we have for the last two days. I don’t think it will be our last day of focusing on heroes for the whole 365 Day Journaling Prompt Series, but not in the same way we have been and not tomorrow.

For today, I want us to consider heroes in our lives that appear like villains to the outside world and/or those who could play for both teams. What do I mean by that?

Well sometimes people look at villains like The Joker, The Riddler, Lex Luther, and they see people who are deeply misunderstood. Like Groot from “Despicable Me” who is clearly a villain, and they think “that guy has a good heart, but somewhere along the line he was so deeply wounded by someone he cared about, or by life in general, that now he fights from a place of being harmed himself. If people treated him differently, he wouldn’t be a villain anymore, but they keep proving that he is right to choose the side he fights for.”

Sometimes, villains are the more relatable main character. Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent” is coming to mind, although to be honest I don’t know her backstory well enough to fit it into this post.

Well-written villains make most average humans think “that man/woman really isn’t wrong. He/She is just hurting. I wish the hero would help him/her with that, instead of trying to vanquish him/her all the time.”

And then there are the heroes who play for both sides. X-Men always come to mind for me in this way. X-Men are the most human of any super hero archetype I have ever encountered. Maybe you read more comics, more books, or watch more superhero shows or movies than I do.

If you are not familiar with the X-Men series, I will do my best to give you a high level overview from what I have seen. X-Men, and all of the heroes and villains in the X-Men mutant family are exactly that: humans with super human abilities. They tend to be limited to something(s) that they can do to a degree that no one else can match. For example, my favorite X-Men, Rogue, all she has to do is touch someone and she starts to drain the life out of them. If they are a mutant, she takes on their power with this touch. If she holds onto that person for too long, they die.

Wolverine has the superhuman ability to heal, he has superhuman strength, speed (only in short burts, apparently). He is famous for his signature adamantium claws, which his bones are also made up of.

Who else? Pyro is one of the ones who (from the movies I’ve watched) works for the villains. He does not like how humans treat mutants, and he decides to work against humans in order to make the world a better place for his mutant family. His power is hidden in his name. Just like Cyclops, Ice Man, and Beast – although they work for the good team.

Dr. X has psychic abilities. He can see mutants everywhere in the world thanks to a machine he built, Cerebro.

The backstory of the villains in X-Men is the same as any other villain. They started out as kids, just like the rest of us. They had hopes, dreams, ideas of the way the world is supposed to be. And then, over and over again, those dreams were crushed. They gave up on believing in the goodness of the world, in the goodness of other people. Instead of using their superhuman abilities, their intellect, and their emotional strength to make the world a better place for everybody, they decide to make it a better place just for themselves and people like them.

That is the attraction to becoming a villain in general. You stop caring about a world that doesn’t really care about you. You start honing in on making the world a better place for those whom you deem worthy of caring about. And therein lies the issue that every villain faces, eventually. You have to accept that the world is worth caring about even when it does not care about you.

I haven’t even mentioned Star Wars this whole series yet. But what better example is there in cinematography of the hero’s struggle than that of Luke Skywalker facing his own father, Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, and choosing the Light?

I would mention Star Trek too, but it has been such a long time since I watched that show entirely that I would not be able to do the story line justice today. Maybe you can, if that is something you are passionate about.

So for today’s journaling prompt, I want you to consider this. Maybe you do not know anyone in your life who qualifies as a villain who is actually the hero in his or her own mind. Or a villain who has made his or her way back to the Light. That’s okay. Instead of writing about someone else today, I want you to answer these questions instead:

• “What would be the cause of me becoming a villain in my own story rather than the hero?”
• “What would it take, or what has it taken already, for me to turn away from all that is good for the world at large, that benefits other people, and start fighting for myself and only a select few? The people in the world who are really, genuinely good people?”
• “What would cause or has caused me to hate the world fully, except for those people closest to me and the handful of celebrities/famous people/wealthy idols that I admire (if I have any idols at all)?”
• “Is there anything in the world that would bring me back into the Light (if this happened?)? Is there anything that could melt my cold heart and inspire me to fight for the good of all of humanity, and potentially even other races of beings?”

I can answer the last one for myself. What inspires me to want to do good in the world that benefits all of humanity, and not just a select few, is the reality that fighting for the all always benefits the few as well. It makes the world a better place so that the few can be included in the majority. Fighting for all of humanity changes things in a way that fighting for only a few people cannot do. That is why villains are still villains at the end of the day, even when you feel bad for them. Because they aren’t trying to create something that works for everybody, something that would ALSO work for the few.

Heroes fight for everybody, regardless of whether they receive praise or not, respect, admiration, keys to the city. Those “prizes” that the villains covet are not what a true hero seeks. Heroes feel like they are winning the war without applause. That is something the villain’s ego never allows him or her to grasp. For some reason Catwoman just popped into my mind.

Villains fight for those who will not only appreciate their efforts, but at the end of the day when the war is won, villains believe that their followers will bow down and honor them. Either from a place of gratitude or from a place of fear and indentured servitude.

True heroes couldn’t desire that less if they tried.

That is why being a hero is always better. Heroes tend to appear shallow when compared to the misery of villains. But heroes have their own backstories too. They just tend not to tell it, because they don’t have bad behavior they have to justify to an audience. They are doing the right thing, so no one cares enough to wonder why they are doing it. Sometimes they do. But more people get pulled into the magnetic backstory of a charismatic villain. They are willing to admire someone like the Joker, who even when given the chance abused the one person who loved him the most, Harley Quinn. Intimate relationships are a terrible arena for villains. Their egos never allow them to have true peace.

So you can journal about specific people or characters if you want to today. If that helps you flesh out your ideas. But I really want you to focus on the steps that pave your arc from average person to villain to hero. Please make sure to really consider what it will take to bring you all the way from villain to hero. That step is important to any hero’s journey, and that is what we are doing here. Being a villain is just great character development.

Being a villain is where you step away from the crowd. Where you discover who you really are outside of the confines of group consciousness. Your villain era is where you define yourself. But to remain there is to create a field of negativity so great around yourself that you destroy any potential of ever getting to enjoy your independence. Becoming a hero is the process of carving out that space for yourself and then using your freedom to make it possible for everyone else to enjoy the same potential independence that you cultivate from within. You cannot become a hero if you remain stuck in the mass consciousness. You just can’t. Maybe YOU can. I couldn’t. Heroes like Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Xena (minus the creepy lesbian/pedo overtones), Dr. X, Luke Skywalker all had to break away from the crowd. They all had to discover who they were, especially when the rest of the world would have thought they were insane if they knew the journey they were embarking upon. To the rest of the world, when that is happening, you appear to be a villain. Just like how in The Matrix, the world appears to turn on Neo while he is waking up.

People don’t like change. That’s all I can really say about that.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. Give yourself permission to be rejected while you become that change.

Any questions, just ask them to yourself. Write them down. See what kind of answers you can come up with over time.