It’s a story as old as Disney. The villain is a fruity looking queer and the hero is white and straight. Evil calls for radical change while good defends the status quo. The villain says that the ends justify the means and commits an over the top atrocity. The hero saves the day and prevents the atrocity. Another win for neoliberalism! As a left-leaning queer growing up anytime in the last 30 years, it can be easy to look at the depiction of queerness in media and decide to simply yes-and the framing, embracing your assigned role as the villain in the story and deciding that it’s better to be evil than to be “good” according to their standards. This is really common and is basically how Satanists recruit people.

I’m no exception to this trend. After spending most of my 20s desperately trying to appease the moral standards of a society that hated my existence and under the thumb of a partner who was quick to call me evil, crazy, and stupid whenever I did anything he disliked, I had a major psychotic break and decided to flip the script. I started calling myself evil so that the threat of being labeled evil couldn’t control me, I started calling myself crazy so that the threat of being labeled insane couldn’t control me, and I started calling myself dumb so that the threat of being labeled stupid couldn’t control me. This was how I escaped.

Maybe this was necessary, I try to have empathy for my younger self and the actions I took when I had less knowledge. But nonetheless, looking back I recognize those actions as flailing, unskilled, and harmful in ways I could not have foreseen at the time. So for the record, while it *can *be useful in the short term for getting out from underneath shitty and oppressive people, naively reversing their framing like I did is a strictly worse strategy than actually standing up for yourself and what you believe is right. It’s ceding the territory to their definitions instead of rejecting them outright. And worse, it’s a collusion strategy for evil that normalizes and obfuscates actually bad behavior behind a bunch of traumatized edgy girls being edgy. You know how many times in Empty Spaces the evil witch turned out to just be fr evil and not evil-as-a-bit? Probably too many!

And yeah stardust, listen, I get it. When your abuser frames things such that you’re bad/stupid/insane for not always agreeing with them, it can be very powerful to just go “then let me be evil” and give them the middle finger. It’s fun to reclaim words that have been used against you, it feels empowering and liberating. I’m personally still a big fan of the word bitch in how neatly it packages all the traits of women the patriarchy dislikes into one handy and empowering word.

But stardust, not every word should be reclaimed, and you probably don’t want to actually be evil. There is real evil in this world and it’s likely not something you want to have associated with yourself. There are rapists and murderers and genocidal warlords out there, so when edgy traumatized girls call themselves evil it waters down that concept of evil and makes it easier to launder horrible horrible things through a lens of cultural relativism.

An example of a similar thing which I’m sure a lot of people will take issue with is how in certain leftist circles the term rape became over-applied to any form of consent violation regardless of how minor it was, and how that over-application allowed actual rapists to fly under the radar by saying “oh they just call everything rape”. Fortunately, queer culture has largely grown past that and the term rape was able to retain its potency as a term for something actually awful, but in the case of evil? Well, evil as a term is very abstract and is close enough in meaning to “like really super bad” that it can be easy to dismiss it as pure signal with no substance, as something entirely dependent on culture with no underlying ethical truth.

In fact, a fairly common position held by many is that there’s no such thing as an ethical truth, that ethics are entirely subjective and purely depend on who and where you find yourself. This is the premise behind Yudkowksy’s Three Worlds Collide story, as well as the justifications for much of the world’s foreign policy. When there are no ethical truths, all that remains is an ontological holy war between orthogonally opposed powers. While this isn’t something I believe, whether or not ethical truths exist is well outside the scope of this essay and also not necessary for the topic at hand. In this Yudkowsky and I agree, regardless of what society and the world tell you the ethical truth is, in the end it’s always your own felt-sense of good and bad that informs your actions. Calling yourself evil is betraying that felt-sense though, definitionally.

If you’re calling yourself evil because you constantly feel bad and your felt-sense is constantly telling you that you’re awful, then instead of lampshading that and making it everyone else’s problem, maybe you should go clean up your room and work on improving yourself so that you don’t feel like you’re constantly betraying your own values? And don’t just hugbox yourself and lie to your felt-sense that you’re good and everything is okay when you know otherwise either. The reason that the therapyspeak “uwu you’re so valid” stuff grates on people so much is because letting someone else (or even yourself) argue over your felt values with some external narrative (regardless of how rational that narrative declares itself to be) is allowing yourself to be gaslit.

The corollary to this of course, is that if you’re calling yourself evil because *you *feel like you’re good but society says otherwise then you’re *also *allowing yourself to be gaslit and are actively participating in your own disempowerment. You’re both lying and submitting to the definitions of people that want to harm and exploit you and you’re doing it for clout on bluesky, girl please.

In both the cases of the therapyspeak “everyone is valid and good” hugbox, and the edgy twitter girls “I’m so quirky and evil” hatebox, you’re giving up your ability to define yourself and your beliefs to the broader consensus definitions of the external world; settling for letting an egregore write your script for you, and thus set your fate. “She died like every other Disney villain, in a huge multicolored explosion of drama.”

Instead stardust, desire to be in touch with your own felt sense of ethics and justice and empathy and responsibility to others, not to let the world hammer its external ideals into you, but that deep down you do care about right and wrong by your own standards, whatever they are. If you want to truly be free, then decide for yourself what it means to be good and do good in the world. Act in accordance with your own will and agency, not some external definition. Be good by your own standards, and don’t lie to yourself to hide the fact you’re failing yourself.

Don’t silence the small quiet part of you that’s willing to say “no, this is wrong”. You can bullshit and make excuses forever, but you’ll always know deep down what’s bullshit and what’s not. Honor your felt-sense of ethics and be good to yourself and the world, for yourself.

Because the alternative is hating yourself to justify doing things you hate yourself for doing but continue to do anyway in order to continue hating yourself further. It doesn’t end anywhere good. If you realize you’re currently digging a tunnel to hell, maybe stop digging?