I don’t think they think of them as heroes. I think they think of them as rockstars or artists.

Basically as a person gets more uncomfortable, lashing out in anger becomes more attractive. The instinct comes from evolution where a good subset of misery could actually be remedied with violence.

But it goes beyond instinct. Like I said it’s an art. And I mean activist art. Art meant to shock. Art meant to open eyes.

They see normal human society as a mechanism allowing people to ignore suffering. They see a world in which some people are treated like trash, consistently.

We humans have a very nasty instinct to pick someone to treat like shit. Unless a person is very careful, they’ll find themselves part of a group of people who unconsciously collude to label a particular person as “the problem”, and then heap cruelty on that person in the name of “heroically fighting the bad guys”.

The Villain is an archetype, and our society is lacking in villains, so people fill in the blank by picking the person who rubs them the wrong way, and they cast that person as The Villain.

The Villain is a mask with super glue on the inside that we stick onto certain people’s faces. We treat them like they’re a disease, or a parasite, or an inhuman invader.

Because The Villain is everyone’s enemy, The Villain lives in a world of nothing but enemies. He lives in enemy territory. Eventually, he carries out his side of the war.