I watched parts of the film Dangerous Liasons the other, in preparation for a class I’m doing. I was reminded of a few things. First, that the costuming is magnificent, and always makes me glad not to live back then*. Second, I’m glad smells don’t come through the screen yet. Third, although its a magnificent film, I always find myself rooting for the Sweet Meteor of Doom to smite the main characters. No wonder the middle class and some peasants felt that they’d had enough of these creeps.
For those who didn’t see the film (or read the novel it is taken from), the two main characters do very unkind things to undeserving people, and end up destroying themselves along with at least three innocents. All for power and lust. Glenn Close and John Malkovich play members of the French nobility, and are both slimy, witty, brilliant villains. Close’s character is peeved because a lover left her to marry, and she wants to get even. So she decides to use Vicomte de Valmont (another former lover) to destroy most-recent-lover’s fianceé. Valmont has another seduction in mind, and it goes downhill for the bystanders from there. There are plots within plots, and while both main characters end getting what they deserve, sort of, the collateral damage is terrible.
The film is gripping as you wonder how Valmont is going to fulfill the conditions of Mertuil’s wager, and how Mertuil will aid or hinder him. Will the innocents resist his efforts? What about outside characters who get entangled in the wager? Oh, and the costumes and settings are lovely, putting the watcher into the world of France in the mid-1700s. There’s sort of a morbid fascination as the tale unfolds, or at least there was for me, as I watched the protagonists try to manipulate each other as well as the people around them. But there’s no one to really root for, unless it is the innocents caught in the web.
I’m not certain I could ever write that kind of story. The film reaches a satisfying end, sort of, but there are no heroes, only innocents who become pawns to be manipulated by greater (?) powers. It made a magnificent film, but I need good to win and be rewarded, and evil to be punished.
So, could you write a story with two protagonist/antagonists who are both villains? How would you do it, if you could? If not, what stops you (aside from plot complexity, which alone is enough to send me running into the welcoming darkness of night.**)
*Not that any of my ancestors would have been wearing what Glenn Close and the other noble ladies wore. My pedigree runs to servants, craftsmen, and farmers. And Dutch burghers and businessmen on one side.
**I’m listening to goth music as I type. There’s darkness, and darkness. I know which one I prefer to deal with, and to write.
Mad Genius Club 
26 responses to “Where’s the Hero? Two Antagonists, No Good Guy”
You’ll need to be more specific.
About the music, i mean.
Kamelot, Type O Negative, Dark Sarah, and something from Serenity (the band, not the movie) wandered in somehow. Sisters of Mercy and The Cure have not come up on the rotation yet.
unless its cancelled, I’m going to see SoM later in the month….
Sweet! They sold out in the DFW area.
I bought them when they became available.
This weekend we’re going to Philly to see Front 242 and Crystal Method. It’s 242’s last tour.
I’ve written non-heroes as the main characters, but only in short stories. If they’re that unpleasant, I don’t want to spend more time with them.
Frex, my legal fantasy, Fractional Ownership, revolves around a fellow who just can’t take responsibility for his own life. His tale was amusing to write, but could I spend a whole novel with him as the main character? No. Just no.
I have villains and other bad people in my novels, and I even write from their point of view, but I always spend more time with the heroes. I like them better.
I have about a third of a steampunk story written from the POV of (future) Inquisitor Jerome os Storm. It’s kind of a start of darkness in that a man who was merely rather uptight and emotionally stunted goes through some highly traumatic and embittering experiences, and comes out, as a paranoid and fanatic loose cannon that the hero in the main books had to massage and work around. I found it hard enough to get into his head that this one is way, way on the backburner. There’s a prequel novel I could end doing with him as a supporting character that might help lay the groundwork; we’ll see if that happens.
One of my main beefs with modern high fantasy is being expected to spend significant headtime with the dark lord’s minions; it was one of the reasons I stopped trying to get into the Wheel of Time novels. It doesn’t bother me as much in the tv adaptations, maybe because we’re seeing them from outside.
I do write “reluctant villain” POVs occasionally: the only male POV in Slaying a Tyrant is the brother of the hero’s dead first wife, who’s been brainwashed against the hero by the villain. The Star Master books both have kind of clockpunch villains working for the High Council who eventually change sides. If I wrote high fantasy, the villain POV would probably look like that bit player orc-dude in episode 203 of Rings of Power, who just wants a break from all the fighting and hasn’t figured out yet that the “lord-father” proto-orc is going squander the orcs’ lives as surely as Sauron or Morgoth.
Oh man, that bit with the pacifist orc who just wants to raise kids and whatnot has everyone in an uproar among the Tolkien fans. I can certainly understand why — they could have shown Haradrim or Variags or Easterlings who wanted out from Sauron’s tyranny (but then I understand the show has Sauron as ‘just misunderstood’), but the orcs?
Oh, yeah. Orcs in Tolkien go bonkers when Sauron falls; they are not independent agents.
Then, Tolkien never managed to work that out to his own satisfaction.
Between the Shagrat-Gorbag dialogue, the Mordorian versus Sarumanian orc conflicts that Merry and Pippin witness, and the goblins of the Misty Mountains, they look fairly autonomous to me. They panic when Sauron’s no longer controlling them, like any army that’s not getting orders any more.
But, as you say, he never really figured it out to his satisfaction.
Moe Lane’s got some interesting orcs in his Fermi Resolution series. If you read them in publication order (which I recommend), the first one you meet is a Catholic priest.
Yeah, no. Sauron’s plenty evil in the show, just there’s a bunch of annoying groupies who think the actor’s hot and thereby distort the discourse around the series. For the orcs, they use the “warped descendants of elves” backstory from the Silmarilllion (which is one of like, five or six ideas Tolkien had about how orcs worked), and posit a corrupted elf/proto-orc who’s set himself up as the orc ruler. The orcs are somewhat less dysfunctional under him than they are under the actual dark lords (hence the orc nuclear family moment), but they’re still abundantly nasty people who kill humans and eat horses, and to me it seems clear that the proto-orc warlord guy is just using them for his own ends.
There’s a lot about the show that’s annoying, notably its cottonmouthed dialogue and very stupid takes on Numenor and the Elves, but as someone who’s actually watched it, I can tell you ROP doesn’t actually soften or excuse the baddies anywhere near as much as its detractors claim.
Thanks for setting me straight on that. I’ve heard some people talk like the show’s writers have done everything short of unearthing Tolkien’s remains so they could relieve themselves on them on air. I’m glad to hear that things have been badly exaggerated.
No problem! I get why people find it annoying as a show, but a couple family members and I watch it as a guilty pleasure, and The Acolyte it honestly ain’t.
Plot complexity can be a lot of fun. It was a real brain teaser hiding one plot inside of another plot such that the audience would see both, but follow the red herring plot.
Characters who I just wish would die? Not so much.
Heck, even one fanfic thing came to a screeching halt because I just couldn’t write what seemed to be the most reasonable course of action of one of the abject monster antagonists. I couldn’t even tell if it was I just couldn’t write that scene, or if that character wouldn’t do that, despite being an abject monster.
I watched that movie a long time ago. When it was over I thought to myself, “This is why the French invented the guillotine.” 😀
It’s no fun if it doesn’t really matter who wins in the end.
Worse if you wish they could both lose.
True but OTOH I can remember a lot of old-school tabletop wargamers or Avalon Hill wargame fans who enjoyed settings like WW2’s Eastern Front because it felt less depressing to win when you were using troops from a nation just as bad as the one you were fighting.
And I’ve seen surprisingly many WH40K novels that can get you rooting for someone or -thing that comes from one of the more horrible factions if only because they, personally, have some sense of decency or honor.
Well, yeah, that’s war games. Detachment helps. Better than getting passionately invested in your knights in a game of chess.
I might be able to write a story with two Villains as the main characters (devious, finger-twiddling evil geniuses with Doctorates in Evil and Master’s Degrees in Maniacal Laughter), but genuinely and utterly evil people would give me trouble. Delightfully diabolical is different from realistic, genuine monsters.
(I do have a lingering fantasy plot about two nobles vying behind the scenes over the loyalty/soul of the nation’s hero. Kind of if there were two separate Palpatines squabbling over a more genuinely noble – though oblivious – Anakin Skywalker. But I’m not sure yet how it goes.)
I have a soft spot for the movie Evil of Frankenstein, which is basically arrogant mad scientist aristocrat vs the carny barker he needs to control his monster. It is completely idiotic but I will watch it in preference to a lot of less stupid stuff in or out of the same genre.
No, I can’t and won’t.
I want to write in such a way that brings light and hope, not to encourage people to wallow in the darkness.
“So, could you write a story with two protagonist/antagonists who are both villains?”
Short answer, no. I can’t be having that in my head. Life is hard enough.
Longer answer, no, because why would I care what happens to these people? Pray for an asteroid, my friends.
I remember the movie, and I recall my opinion was it was a shame the main characters didn’t get nuked from orbit. Deus ex machina, the wrath of the Gods delivered express. I’m sure it won many awards.
It is popular to say that we get ossified with age, lose that flexibility we had in youth. Less popular but still true is that those of us who have some years behind us have learned not to keep hitting our heads on the same wall, expecting or hoping for things to turn out differently. It is always the same. The wall remains, and my head hurts.
This is one of those things that the Usual Suspects claim to be all about flexibility, but really just makes your head hurt.
I have difficulty, as a fan, getting through a story with no one to root for. There’s no way I could do it as a writer. I couldn’t get through the final season of <i>Breaking Bad</i> because there just wasn’t anyone in that show that I wanted to win. The movie versions of Donald Westlake’s Parker character are also hard to watch unless I’m in the right mood. I’m just one of those people that <b>needs</b> a character to root for, somewhere, in the story.
Depends on the genre and the length of the story. I can handle it for the length of a movie, particularly a comedy. In the Clue movie pretty much all of the characters are terrible people and most of them are also murderers. Still hilarious to watch though.
I think this is why the ‘they all did it!’ ending really does work best (of the alternate endings). Because they DO get their comeuppance.
Other factors: You don’t have to be in ANYONE’s head. Also the movie encourages you to guess/root for who’s going to get offed next so leans into the “why can’t they all lose?” and answers it with “Yes, yes they actually CAN all lose!” (Depending on the ending, not that they all necessarily WILL lose, but that that they can.)