V for Vendetta, The Guy Fawkes likeness, and Anonymous all celebrate a man who by all historical accounts and modern definitions is known as a religious terrorist. That’s not really what I’m here to talk about, but it’ll come up.

In V for Vendetta, we’re obviously meant to side with and even admire V, though he too represents political extremism, vigilante justice (read: a total disregard for due process), mob mentality, and torture as a valid means of political radicalization. In fact, V hardly identifies as a leader; the catalyst for his vigilantism is a personal vendetta (duh) with the administration responsible for his trauma and disfigurement.

The film forces us to assess V’s methods through the lens of heroism, seeing as his adversary is a truly unlikeable network of authoritarians, oppressors, and opportunists with a fetish for supremacy and sadism. We follow V on his journey to administering what he believes to be the ultimate punishment: the destruction of Parliament. He offers a principled justification for terrorism: freedom from tyranny is worth the price of death and destruction. After all, what’s to like about this shitty-ass place? You have government overreach, secret police, surveillance, media fear-mongering, censorship, corruption, religious hypocrisy, global pandemic…

Pandemic? Wait. Oh no…

Oh. Oh no.

So, what is “freedom” then? How do you obtain freedom? How do you hold onto it? We know the answer according to V’s narrative. Freedom is anarchy. Freedom is incompatible with authority. Freedom is freedom from government, freedom from oppressors, freedom from your own perceived shortcomings, freedom from public complacency…

Until V showed up, it seemed as though nobody cared about making any meaningful change to their oppressive situation. The general citizenry of this dystopian regime was funneled through the relatable workaday character of Evey  — an average woman who is all at once dissatisfied, ignorant, complacent…and totally powerless. It was our hero, V who showed her the path to revolution. It was V who rescued her from the shackles of her mundane life. It was V who radicalized her — groomed her. She knew what freedom was all along, but she needed someone to show her the way to take it back. She needed a guide. Someone with physical might. Someone with determination. Someone with a plan and a focused message. Someone with the charisma to organize and assemble. In short, someone with perceived authority. Someone who saved her life and then decidedly beat her into submission (figuratively and literally, I mean let’s face it).

At the same time that V encourages unadulterated freedom from authority, he IS authority. Remember, his rage is rooted in personal trauma. Let’s get down to brass tacks here: he rallies others to his cause in the interest of revenge — which he frames as an anti-fascist revolution. V is a bit of a demagogue, no?

So, is V’s revolution a convenient excuse for him to get back at those who traumatized him? Or is V’s revenge the perfect catalyst that sparks an authentic, self-motivated uprising from an oppressed majority?

It doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s a leader. He’s the face of change. The masks are a token of support for an authority figure that these people have accepted as their messiah. They idolize him — they fight for him and they don’t even know who he is. He claims that what he represents is not a person but an idea. He’s not wrong, but he’s not being completely honest either. Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. Nobody picks an idea up off the ground and decides to roll with it. Ideas exist in people. Ideas exist — they are conceived and disseminated— as a result of morals, principles, lived experiences, identities, conflicts…

V is a recruiter. V is a leader. V has values and experiences that shape his beliefs. V runs counter to his own ideas. V is authority.

V is “the correct” authority.

V is a person who cultivates an idea.

Ideas are hard to kill. Spoken by the right voice, they’re hard to ignore. Cloaked in the right rhetoric, they’re hard to argue. Easy to adopt. Contagious. Pestilent.

Ideas are bulletproof, and that really could be a problem.