A few reasons why someone might hate "Reformed villains"
- Not all people like a character just because of his looks and his dress-style - there is something called a personality. Part of that personality is that a villain is mean, arrogant, powerful, determined, smart as hell or whatever makes him such a well liked villain. If that is replaced with gentle, masochistich, whimpy, undecided, dumb and what not, it is just not the same character anymore. It's annoying.
- It is so senseless, if you anyway just make the character over, why not introduce a new one. Why ruin a good villain? I know people who are able to notice the actual personality of a character are rare as opposed to the "get his shirt off" masses, while some even like this bad guy turned into remorseful goodie theme. But it is so overused and done with so little care and often written with such little talent, that you wonder why people who wrote it actually put their name under it.
- Personality changes are indeed common in tv shows or comics. Next to paralell dimensions and time jumps this is the most used themed by screenwriter's without any imagination left. Just because 80% or more of the fan won't notice if their canons act strange, does not mean one should aim to keep the personalities consistant. How about some quality? It can't be really that hard to have one or two guy with brains look over screenwriter's scripts and say, "No,he might be a bad guy, but he still has some self-respect".
- We can have a villain/ good girl romance plot without the need to change the bad guys character completely. Enough with this brain washed image of relationships anyway, but if they must do this crap, leave our favourite villains alone.
- What's anyway with this conformist shit in tv and movies nowadays?
Why has everything to have a certain pattern? Can't they just once in
a while make something with a little more style. Enough of the straight
pattern movies flop anyway, so how about stop conditioning the masses
and open up a few more original plots? Like one that includes everyone's
favourite villain as a villain and not a twisted good version of him,
because - oh my! - we can't have a villain going relatively unblemished
through the plot.