the-bar-sinister:

“That villain doesn’t feel love, because real love is selfless.”

Fine, you know what emotions aren’t selfless, and the villain can feel perfectly well?

Adoration, affection, admiration, lust, yearning, desire, devotion, obsession, possessiveness, fondness, tenderness, attachment, passion…

“real love is selfless” is also such a bizarre thing to say

how would you even define that. “selfless.” “real love”

“my mother has real, selfless love for me because she would give up everything for my sake” oh? and why does she do that? Would she do it for anyone who isn’t her kid? Why does she choose to do it for the one entity who is her own offspring, and not any of the other, unrelated people who need it more?

how could anyone claim there’s nothing selfish in that?

show me a love that’s selfless and i’ll show you a love that’s meaningless and also probably doesn’t exist. something of your self– whether it’s your genes or your past or your future or your ethics or ideology or whatever– has gotta be involved with a thing, for you to have any reason to care about it. That’s what caring is.

and, once you acknowledge your “self” being involved in love in that sort of way, you might go “well that’s not really selfish”… but then you think a little while longer, and you find out just how meaningless it is to try to define where the line of “really selfish” is.