I see it mainly in Fantasy Books.
One Brother is the good one, he is manly, strong, don’t care about riches, and have a good heart. He will be the protagonist or the protagonist friend.
The other one is the Bad Brother, he have a more weak body, have femine traits, always using fancy clothes and jewels, is less loved by others, and he is jealous. He will be the antagonist.
In a arc of >!Ranger!< this trope is reverse, which was a breath of air.
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Mine are both manly, powerful, and of questionable sexuality. One is evil because he thinks his brother had everything handed to him. The other recognizes that both of them were privileged and oppressed in various ways. Better?
I’m currently re-reading through The Fencer Trilogy by K.J Parker and it does a good job subverting this by having both brothers be pieces of shit, just one is slightly worse than the other.
Villains have been queer coded for decades. You can guess why
Sauron, famously a gay man.
lol just because they have a flair for the dramatic?? Come on, most of us would wear capes and make grand declarations if we could
That and being gay is bad mmkay? Levels of casual cultural homophobia
And today, all villains must be rich white men. You can guess why.
Uh, because billionaires are villains?
Finally some realism
What do you mean “today”? The novels I read from the 1800’s are a goldmine of rich, white villains… it’s almost like they were always hated…
Also, in fairy tales, the oldest child is inevitably the villain. There might’ve been some truth to that back when the eldest (usually a son) inherited the family’s wealth, but it’s no longer universally applicable, especially in America where younger children tend to be favored.
it depends, this may be survivorship bias, because when a brother is a villain, it is usually the eldest
however, when a brother isn’t the villain, the protagonist is usually the firstborn. especially in the Fairy Books, there’s a bunch of mentions of “so-and-so had other 19 younger brothers and sisters” and things like that
The funniest instance I’ve seen of this trope is in the film Wizards (1977, Ralph Bakshi animation) where a fairy queen gives birth to twins, named Avatar and Blackwolf. You can probably guess which one grows up to be the good, kind, hippie gnome, and which one basically turns into a sickly Saruman with skeleton arms.
Well yeah, but isn’t that also the one where in a medieval fantasy land, a modern handgun gets pulled out to solve a problem?
Not just a single modern handgun.
The good guys are all elves and fairies and whatever fairytale creatures, using magic and swords and spears, while the bad guys are all orcs and robots and whatever abominations using tanks and rifles and projecting Nazi propaganda and war imagery TO THE SKY to scare the good guys.
Oh, almost forgot: one of the aliases of the evil twin is just “the führer”, and his throneroom is in the shape of a swastika, with the throne in the middle. The film isn’t too subtle.
This could almost be a description of a very great number of Harry Potter fan fics.
I haven’t read much fanfiction who are the two brothers? Harry and Draco? Harry and Neville? Ron and Harry? Harry and Dudley?
Harry is pretty rich but obviously he’s the hero so is he supposed to be the good or bad one in this situation?
Paging Prince Harry….
You might like reading 100 years of solitude where one brother is one type, and the other is another. Then their names get recycled and switched through the generations.