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Ehhhh they've been trying to do it with Lex Luthor since "Smallville", too, with the "Daddy didn't love me and that's why I'm a bad person" stuff. Which is a pretty far cry from the Classic Coke flavor "I murdered my parents for the insurance money, not because they were abusive but because I'm selfish, greedy, impatient, and they were simply in my way" Lex Luthor.
Like, in real life MOST of the biggest assholes are simply assholes for no reason, or that they perceive compassion and charity as weakness. Yes, abuse turns good people rotten and it happens often, but the worst people humanity has ever known were always bad. For example, I have traits of a sociopath, but I'm not literally A Sociopath, because I do occasionally have sincere feelings of compassion and empathy. A sociopath can't feel those things at all, ever, as they were not born with the mental capacity to feel them. To them, NOT stealing, raping, or killing makes no sense, because "I want to, so I should be allowed to if I can get away with it."
A character like Lex - at least Evil Businessman Lex - works so much better as a textbook sociopath than as an ignored or abused Daddy's Boy. The latter would actually come by his acts of charity and goodwill honestly, because having been a "less fortunate" he would still have an inkling of compassion for those people and would sincerely want to help them. However we all know that Lex actually only does good things for PR reasons and to puff up his public image. He has zero actual empathy and that's been established. Therefore, he's simply a True Sociopath and just plain bad person, not someone who "broke bad". Joker, too, if you really want to get into it.
This is where I run into a huge disconnect with a lot of Liberals. They will loudly advocate - rightly - for more resources devoted to mental health. But they will ALSO very aggressively deny the notion that "some people are just plain bad people." But this makes no sense, as it is BECAUSE we have more resources than ever before to study and understand mental health that we know, for a fact, that Sociopathy and Psychopathy are real and untreatable conditions, that some people are REALLY bad and all you can do is lock them up or kill them. So they try and have it both ways, push for better understanding of mental health BUT then refute the findings when it turns out those findings are "mean". They will insist that there's no such thing as a "bad person" and that people only do bad things because they were picked on or downtrodden. Even though the mental health resources that they themselves have advocated for prove the exact opposite. It's very strange.
But yeah, can't have Actual Villains in movies and TV shows anymore, even though some people really are villains and don't need any reason beyond they're wired like that. This is why so many women think they're gonna "fix" the boyfriend who cheats on them and gets drunk and hits them, for example. "He's just misunderstood, he's not REALLY a bad person! I saw in a movie how Cruella de Ville is actually a misunderstood super-hero and now I think Real Life works like that." It's very dangerous and irresponsible to put that kind of thing out into the world, frankly. It gets people into real trouble when they think every sociopath they meet is only like that because someone spanked them as a kid or stole their bike or whatever.
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