Zarutaku said:That quite the in depth analysis of the word evil, but I think for most people it just means "deliberately harmful"
Yes, but what many people choose to describe and define as "deliberately harmful" as opposed to not is extremely self-serving and selective, because for most people it's a term designed and utilized to "other" people who go against and threaten their own material self-interest while absolving themselves or anyone or anything in service of their own interests and advancement of the need to be placed in the same "evil" category with all its associated stigma and baggage.
The way that most people use it, whether referring to fictional characters or actual offscreen people, has always also to me had an implication of something somehow beyond and outside of humanity - something unnatural, whereas in reality every single conceivable thing a human could ever do or even think to do is as natural as anything a whale, lemur, or slime mold could do. Yet using this term has this moralistic mythological bent to it which seems to seek to imply that some actions or intentions are demonic, fantastical, magical, etc., rather than just normal nature and biology in flux.
Obviously in anime, and also in other mediums which give life to fiction, there are sometimes supernatural and non-human entities which are given personhood as characters and they may be conceived of and designed to be and fill out the role of what constitutes "evil" in the colloquial usage and popular imagination - maybe by the original writer and creator themselves. But I just think it's a flawed concept at its root.
You mentioned "deliberately harmful", but someone can seek to be deliberately harmful because it serves, in their mind, some greater good and is preferable to the alternative of not doing whatever it is. I would say not "deliberately harmful", but "cruelty for the sake of cruelty" - as in, the cruelty alone is the point and nothing else, which best epitomizes what the meat of the word is trying to get at. Not for proactive defense, not for revenge or imposition of subjective justice, not for wealth or power or lust or envy or rage. But purely for the infliction of suffering for its own sake. But in reality, even that has a cause, so while I understand how it is used colloquially and why it is used that way, I think it just oversimplifies at the expense of accuracy.
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