Okay, hear me out before you close this tab.
I'm not saying Jafar was a good guy. He manipulated a teenager, hypnotized a sultan, and turned himself into a giant snake just to make a point. That's not exactly redemption-arc material. But somewhere in the middle of all that scheming, he said one thing that I genuinely think we don't give enough credit to.
He understood something about power that nobody else in that story wanted to admit.
The part everyone skips over
Here's the thing about Agrabah as a setting: it's run by a sultan who's kind, but also kind of a pushover. He's the kind of ruler who gets talked into things, who doesn't question his most trusted advisor, who lets other people make the hard calls because he'd rather keep the peace than rock the boat. And look — that's a nice guy. I'd probably enjoy having tea with him. But it's not exactly a stable way to run a kingdom.
Jafar saw that. He saw a power vacuum dressed up as "benevolent leadership," and he understood, correctly, that soft power without boundaries is an invitation. Somebody was always going to walk through that door. He just happened to be the one willing to do it.
That's not a defense of what he did with that insight. It's just an acknowledgment that his read on the situation wasn't wrong. The kingdom was vulnerable. The sultan's trust was being exploited by somebody, the whole time, long before Jafar made his final move. Jafar just stopped pretending that wasn't happening.
Why this bugs me about "good" characters
I think we have this instinct in fairy tales to treat kindness and strength as if they're opposites. Like the second a character sets a boundary, strategizes, or protects themselves, we start sliding them toward "villain" on some invisible scale. Meanwhile the "good" characters get rewarded for being endlessly trusting, endlessly patient, endlessly willing to give people the benefit of the doubt — even when it's clearly not serving them.
Jafar, for all his very real flaws, never had that problem. He read a room. He planned ahead. He didn't wait around hoping things would work out.
Imagine if the sultan had done even a fraction of that. Imagine if Jasmine's entire arc hadn't needed to start with "I have to escape the only life I've ever known because nobody will actually listen to me." A lot of that story's tension exists specifically because the "good" characters didn't want to do the one thing the villain understood instinctively: pay attention to where your power is actually vulnerable.
Where I landed with this in The Three Wishes
This is honestly a big part of why I wrote my own retelling the way I did. I didn't want a story where the "good" characters win just because they're nice and the "bad" characters lose just because they're mean. I wanted characters — on both sides — who are paying attention, who understand leverage, who know exactly what they're risking and why.
Gabriel isn't a hero in the traditional sense. Cassian isn't a cartoon villain either. Everyone in this story is making calculated moves, the same way Jafar was, and the difference between who you end up rooting for isn't "who's playing the game" — it's what they're willing to do, and who they're willing to hurt, to win it.
So, was Jafar right?
About seizing power through manipulation and fear? No. Obviously not. That's the actual villain part, and it's not getting a pass here.
But about recognizing that unchecked trust is a liability? About understanding that "nice" and "safe" aren't the same thing? About knowing that someone, eventually, was going to exploit the gap he saw? Yeah. He was right about that. He just chose to be the exploit instead of the fix.
What do you think — is there a version of this story where someone else closes that gap before Jafar gets the chance? Tell me in the comments who you think should've seen it coming.
And if you want to see how I played with this exact tension in my own retelling, Chapter One of The Three Wishes is free on the blog. [Read it here →]
