Re: villainless stories

I mostly agree with you. I don't generally care for stories with really evil villains, and I don't like it when characters who aren't real villains but just jerks get treated to vindicate-type consequences. I'm necessarily in favor of letting villains who are actual criminals get away with their crimes, though. I think people ought to suffer consequences under the law when they break the law and it's a false sentimentality that wants to release them from that. That doesn't preclude personal forgiveness, and it certainly doesn't include brutal or sadistic sorts of punishments (don't like those at all), but there's an erroneous idea I've seen before, that if you're pure of heart or good or honorable you should want to save people from punishment even when it's just.

To get back to your original point, though, I think you and I share a certain distaste for melodrama, and for stories where characters who are only bad in very ordinary ways in Austen's books are portrayed in an exaggeratedly evil way, and then are basically sentenced to a loveless, miserable existence as punishment. Such endings never please me, but just leave me feeling like the whole story's unpleasant. These are often also the same stories where Darcy and Elizabeth (especially Elizabeth) are portrayed in idealistic terms. I guess some people prefer their characters to be straight-up black or white, rather than a complex mixture of both.