this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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What are you talking about? Maybe I have something blocked, but I see nothing close to that in this thread.
Well, you have to understand that the average person isn't a mythology nerd. You might be, but to the average person, the word "narcissist" comes from self help books about the evils of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In the common verbiage, "narcissist" is an accusation of personality disorder, in much the same way as other words like autist, schizo, or r*tard. You see the parallel?
Ok, if taken as medical term (which happens way too often with these words) it can be seen as derogatory and making fun of a psychological disorder.
But I'd argue that no average person thinks of the word that way. I don't think narcissism is ever seen as disorder in popular culture. From outside perspective it looks more like a choice, especially when compared to autism, schizophrenia or mental deficiency. None of those look like choices (autism being the most debatable out of the examples).
In a colloquial sense narcissist is just a selfish asshole. When talking about horror story narcissist, sociopath and / or psychopath depictions, I'm hard pressed to feel empathy for these characters. I'm not saying they are not sick, but having a disorder doesn't automatically make actions and motivations any more justifiable.
I recently watched a youtube video about autistic kids as horror movie villains. There's a lot of them! There are also plenty of queer horror movie villains. Plenty of schizophrenic villains, plenty of villains with DID. Plenty of nonwhite villains, or more commonly back in the day, white actors in brownface playing villains.
Sometimes horror can be a mirror we hold up to society's biases to critique them. See: anything by Guillermo del Toro. But all too often, horror is a mirror we hold up to society's biases to reproduce them.
The Narcissistic horror movie villain is a repetition of stereotypes about NPD that people already believed.
Maybe you're young, and those were actually your parents' generation's beliefs, which you absorbed out of context. So many people don't even understand their own prejudices.
But there are young people who still believe the most blatant forms of this stereotype. I meet them all the time. They're quite unpleasant to be around.