Thread:Lucentstar/@comment-27032473-20190516020429/@comment-32766427-20190517224757

To understand the reason, you first have to understand some story theory, which I will explain. If you think about it, the reason that people want to consume stories, whether historical or fictional, is because the story offers for their imagination a problem that may be analagous to a problem in their life, and an approach to solving it. The hero of the story is the person with the problem. Either the hero solves the problem (and defeats the villain), or the hero does not solve the problem (and is defeated the villain). The kind of story where the hero wins is more useful/interesting than the kind of story where the hero loses – why, you ask? Because if the hero wins, the problem-solution the hero came up with may be one the reader can apply to the reader's own problem, making the reader victorious as well. But if the hero loses, all the reader learns is one of the infinite possible ways to fail at that problem; something to aviod, but not nearly as valuable as the key to success.

By the way, not all villains lose and get defeated by the heroes. The stories wherein they don't are called tragedies.