Villains, from the inside - Medea’s Side
- kantartriantafillo
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
I’ve always wondered how villains see themselves. Do they recognise their “evil” goals and mischievous behaviour as evil—or do they experience them as necessary, reasonable, even good? When I was a kid, weekend cartoons often served villains with bizarre, self-sabotaging plans. Sometimes their plots sounded less like wickedness and more like confused idealism (or just bad logic): after the plan succeeds, what then? How does the villain actually benefit? Did they think they were doing something wrong from the start, or did they inhabit a different moral map altogether?
That small childhood puzzle never really left me. It just changed costume—as I grew up, my interests shifted, cartoons gave way to music, and the question quietly moved from animated villains to the voices and stories carried by songs.
Songwriting has always been capable of storytelling, but some genres use that potential especially deliberately. Rock and metal, in particular, often treat lyrics as a literary space for retelling familiar tales—from myth, history, scripture, and legend—yet with an important twist: they frequently shift the angle. Instead of letting the “official” version dominate, they give the microphone to characters who were previously reduced to types: the traitor, the witch, the enemy, the killer, the villain.
Sometimes that shift is simply aesthetic, cause “it sounds cool”. But often it does something more substantial: it unsettles the moral comfort of an inherited story—and it can also affect the listener. When a song invites you to inhabit a villain’s perspective, it can increase absorption into the song’s storyworld (a “transportation” effect), making the character’s emotional logic feel momentarily coherent even if you reject it afterward. Add lyrics, and the semantic layer can further steer perceived emotion and mood induction—especially when lyrical meaning and musical cues work together. You might still end up condemning the character—yet you have to condemn them after you have inhabited their voice.
A good example of this move is Insomnium’s “Song of the Dusk”, which retells witch persecutions in seventeenth-century Finland in a way that forces the listener to sit inside the accused perspective. The song does more than reverse blame. The witches appear as figures who feel rebellious and deeply uncomfortable within the Christian framework of their surrounding communities, choosing instead the forests, the silence of trees, and the freedom of the wind as spaces where their identity can breathe. From the inside, this is not villainy but coherence—a way of life, a belief system, a sense of nature and self that refuses to be measured by the moral grammar of the persecutors. The dominant cultural narrative condemns; the song asks what it felt like to be condemned—and why the condemned did not experience themselves as villains at all.
Which brings me to a band that does this kind of perspectival work with unusual intensity.
I still remember the electric charge in the air when I saw the band Khirki live in Germany (fall 202
4), and then again when they passed through once more in 2025. There’s something magnetic about them—this Athens-based band that merges Greek folk textures with hard rock ’n’ roll, dragging the echoes of ancient myths into the pulse of modern riffs. Their thematology is rich and raw. Greek mythology, Balkan folklore, and even Jewish apocalyptic literature. Songs like “Watchers of Enoch” (drawing on, you guessed right, the Enochic tradition) or “Stara Planina” (echoing Balkan vampire and witch legends) show how naturally they weave dense myth into the heavy rock sounds.
But witches—and especially Greek witches—seem to hold a special place in their world. The band’s name itself, Khirki, is the Greek word for Circe, the ultimate witch of Homeric lore. Their latest album Κυκεώνας even features a track titled “Hekate”, talking about the most evil Greek witch of all.
Here, though, I want to focus on a specific song from their first album Κτηνωδία: “Medea”. In a
conversation I had with the band’s frontman, singer, composer, and lyricist Dimosthenis Ioannou, he said something that stuck with me when we were chatting about their music during their recent tour in 2025. He broke down to me the meaning behind this song and to my awe (because I haven’t really realised the concept of the song) does not try to defend Medea. It doesn’t need to. Instead, it lets her tell the story.
From the misty plains I’m coming - Into the sea I am guiding their ways
For the bane of love I’m bearing - And for this man I have darkened my gaze
By the fire of death I’m waiting - Kings and their maidens shall fear my name
For it is not gold I’m yearning - Offer your pledge unto what I became
If my love you take for granted there’s no cheating death - In the name of Hecate there’s no cheating death
Waiting for your lie betrayer - Father and daughter so silent they lie
In the darkest hall my prayer - All of my children are destined to die
If my love you take for granted there’s no cheating death - In the name of Hecate there’s no cheating death
If my love you take for granted there’s no cheating death - In the name of Hecate there’s no cheating death
Oh Med-, oh Medea, Med-, Medea(x3)
From the very first distorted chord, the listener is thrown into a sonic whirlwind of myth, fury, and betrayal. It’s Medea not as the monster, the witch, or the cautionary tale we’ve learned to fear, but as a woman speaking in her own voice.
This raises a deceptively simple question: What happens when the villain tells her story?
We already know “the Medea story” from the outside: the foreign princess from Colchis who helps Jason win the Golden Fleece, follows him into exile, and becomes the figure later tradition labels with its hardest words—witch, threat, child-killer. That version often comes with the verdict built in.
Khirki changes the angle. The song doesn’t mainly describe Medea; it lets Medea speak in first person, and that matters because it makes her the dominant focalizing consciousness: we don’t just learn events, we get her framing of them—her priorities, her emotional logic, her chosen register. That also means: what we hear is not neutral. It’s a perspective. It’s biased on purpose.
She begins with origin and movement (From the misty plains I’m coming / Into the sea I am guiding their ways). Notice the grammar: “I’m coming… I’m guiding”. She puts herself in the subject position and casts herself as agent and guide. If you know the myth, you can hear the Argo behind the line: Jason’s voyage works because of her. Starting here is already a perspective move—she wants her story to begin with what she did for others, not with what others later condemn.
For the bane of love I’m bearing / And for this man I have darkened my gaze. Two choices matter. First, “bane” turns love into a curse, not a romance—she narrates herself as paying a price. Second, “And for… my gaze” sounds like explanation of the first half of the verse: she implies that what she did was to follow her destiny and fall in love (?) with this man. That phrasing doesn’t deny responsibility; it reshapes it. She’s not saying “I didn’t mean it.” She’s saying “I knew what it cost.”
By the fire of death I’m waiting / Kings and their maidens shall fear my name. The key word is “waiting”. It presents revenge as something anticipated, almost scheduled—less a burst of passion and more a pronouncement. The second line widens the frame from personal conflict to public reputation: kings, maidens, my name. That’s a biased stance too. It elevates her violence into something ritual, almost inevitable, and it makes fear part of her self-staging.
For it is not gold I’m yearning / Offer your pledge unto what I became. In a myth saturated with “gold” (the Fleece, heroic profit, status), “not gold” is a rejection of that economy. She asks for recognition. And the phrasing “what I became” is doing heavy work: it insists on an arc (before/after), on transformation, on cost. It’s also a direct claim over meaning—don’t take what you wanted from me and then narrate me as disposable. If stories organise experience and value, this is Medea fighting for how the story values her.
If my love you take for granted there’s no cheating death / In the name of Hecate there’s no cheating death. The refrain doesn’t say “I am evil.” It says “you treated love as cheap—and there are consequences.” Repetition functions like insistence: this is her axis. And “in the name of Hecate” lands less like spooky decoration and more like oath-language: she places her suffering and her justice under a cosmic seriousness.
Waiting for your lie betrayer / Father and daughter so silent they lie. The wordplay (“lie” as betrayal / “lie” as the stillness of the dead) is a perspective choice: she frames the scene as silence, not gore. She compresses the famous Corinth deaths into a quiet aftermath. That’s focalization in action: not just what happened, but what she chooses to linger on when she tells the story.
In the darkest hall my prayer / All of my children are destined to die. The pivot is “destined.” It doesn’t erase agency, but it shifts the explanatory frame toward fate and tragedy. Add “my prayer” and “darkest hall” and the emotional centre becomes interior, not triumphant. She narrates the unbearable as inevitability—because that is a survivable way to tell it.
The final “Oh, Medea” is not voiced by Medea, but by the people that hear her story. Now, that makes sense. That woe is the condemnation that Medea receives after her actions, that are perceive and interpreted only externally without understanding the reasons behind her actions: she was following her predestined story and complying to her already attributed plot. This woe of the people’s perspective does not essentially belong to the storytelling of Medea, but is the echo that humanity remembers from the story of Medea: the repulsiveness for her actions, her social condemnation, and eternal categorization to the villains of history, despite her different opinion on her own story!
The first image was generated with Google's Gemini, and the photos of Khirki and Dimosthenis Ioannou were taken by me during their live performances.
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