Embracing your inner villain

A lot of thoughts come to me while I am in transit or busy with the annoyances of real life, and never get committed to paper. However, this thought stuck with long enough to get down. And it's this little memory that might help people -- mostly guys in my situation but it might help potential fantasy damsels as well --
I was thinking that I never thought of girls I really liked as being, shall we say, damsel-fodder when I was an adolescent or even well into my 20s. But then I remembered that this was not always so: as a little kid, in primary school, all of the girls I fancied back then I always thought of in danger, usually tied up in the clutches of some mad scientist or something like that. At that time I always saw myself as the hero rescuing my heroine.
So I guess the change -- when I was squeamish all of a sudden about putting together my love of the damsel in distress trope with my more mainstream attraction to girls -- might have less to do with adolescent awareness of sexuality and more to do with the roughly parallel process of identity formation. Long before I became terrified that a girl might find out that I liked the DiD scenario and think me bizarre/criminal/laughable (in increasing order of mortification) -- before this came the absurdity of imagining myself the hero of the story. I was at least as uncomfortable with the hero trope as I was with admitting my damsel in distress fantasies with a girl. But I was so wrapped up in conventional thinking then -- wanting to be a "good guy" and all that BS -- that I couldn't see how the fun of villainy was admissable.
So I guess this is the message for younger folks out there today who face similar need to conceal something about themselves. The need to conceal is still real -- the world is a very unforgiving place socially, even more so now, with social media and all the tyranny it enables. But you also need to confront your inner censor as well. If you like the DiD theme -- you're not evil, you really are misunderstood. Embrace your bad side. As the comic Doug Stanhope says (I paraphrase heavily) "Jesus died for your sins?... Your sins are the only interesting things about you."