Draco in Leather Pants | Bulbagarden

Firstly, I'd like to point out that the decent thing to do if you are going to start a thread about a trope is to not assume that everyone is perfectly fluent in all TVTropes pages, and maybe give just a little bit of an explanation of that trope, so people who aren't familiar with the phenomenon by that name but might have an opinion on it aren't excluded from the conversation.

Anyway, I find this considerably less irritating than Ron the Death Eater (canon good guy => fanon bad guy). Obviously, when done badly it is bad, but that is true of literally anything. Here's the shocker, guys: very few people see themselves as an evil villain. If you wrote a story from the perspective of Hitler, it wouldn't be too difficult to make him a sympathetic character because, guess what? He didn't consider himself evil, and within the contexts of his experiences he seems a lot less evil than you would naturally assume. (Special note: I am certainly not defending the Holocaust in any way, shape, or form.) In short, simple fact is that bad guys don't see themselves as bad guys, so it's actually pretty easy, and in most cases pretty true to the canon, to present them as good guys in a story that is from their perspective.

This even easier with Pokemon, particularly in the earlier generations. In Pokemon (and I'm talking about the games here since they are the core of the series) there's quite a lot left to the imagination regarding the specifics of the storyline. There's an awful lot of room for interpretation, and interpreting that "evil" characters don't go around thinking "Oh God, I am such an evil bastard, and I just love it!" isn't exactly a controversial interpretation.

What really irks me is that people's reactions (including the "Draco in Leather Pants" TVTropes page) to the suggestion that characters who do not very nice things (and this is the level that Draco himself is at, let's be honest) or even characters who do downright evil things (such as Sephiroth who has been mentioned) might not see themselves as evil is that the person suggesting this is bastardising the canon and taking ridiculous liberties. Frankly, in my opinion, if a writer is half way decent, all of their characters should be sympathetic from their own perspective (that's not to say that every character needs to be sympathetic in way the narrative is told, but theoretical switches in narrative should uncover unexpected sympathy).

So, to respond to @Drakon;'s idea that writers who employ this trope "better have a damn good reason": how is the fact that it is about 1000000 times more realistic than anyone who is entirely unsympathetic, even to themselves, existing for a damn good reason?