Let’s talk first things first: Do you need a villain?
Well, technically, no you don’t. Your main character can fight disease, or poverty or his own inner demons. Maybe.
It all depends on what you’re writing, doesn’t it?
Mil SF (or war fiction of any kind) doesn’t need an individual villain. You are (presumably) part of an army fighting an enemy. Is your enemy evil? Well, again it depends. Most armies at war paint the enemy as the ultimate evil, but did soldiers in the ranks think of their counterparts that way? I don’t know. I never was in that situation. But the soldiers must at the very least think that killing the enemy is better than being killed. Unless you’re writing something very, very strange.
And let’s face it here, for a minute, the most satisfying military fiction still has an individual villain behind the armies you’re fighting. There’s still a mind you’re grappling with.
In WWI allied soldiers might have a little truce for Christmas with their German counterparts, but they very likely didn’t have the warm fuzzies about Keiser Wilhelm (to say the least.) And if this were a fictional war, his machinations would be responsible for our heroes particular suffering over which he must triumph.
Look, it just feels better that way. Personal suffering, personal triumph. I don’t care if in most of reality humans get swept along by forces too big for them and the reason Johnny suffered in the trenches had nothing to do with the Keiser, except of course for the Keiser’s pushing for the war. (Not that the allied side was shy either. It truly was a horrible war.)
Now, if you’re writing romance, you might have a villain or not. Depends on the plot. There is usually a villain in the sense of a deeply sympathetic character. But take the fanfic writers who make Caroline Bingley or Lady Catherine into mad villains who kill people and end up in Bedlam… A bit over the top, no? For those who haven’t read it, CB is merely a jealous biatch, a rival for the affections of the main male character, and a bit of a snob. Hardly the thing rampaging mass murderers are made of. And Lady Catherine is an older woman, snobbish and full of herself, but again not precisely the sort of person we expect to have poisoned her husband and be trying to poison her daughter. in fact, I must feel that Jane Austen would disapprove of these fanfics, mostly because her writing was a reaction against the gothic romances that were full of these things.
Look, I’m not saying some of those fanfics can’t be fun. I’m saying it’s probably out of character for the original author. And also, it’s not needed. In romance plotting the “antagonist” is the love interest, because it’s against (for?) him that the game is played. There will maybe be people who want to keep the couple from their happy ever after, but it’s not needed.
Now, if you’re talking mystery, or most space opera, you absolutely need a villain. I mean, if you have a murderer, a murder was committed and well, villainy is afoot.
As for space opera, well, there is a reason opera is in the title. You usually have an evil villain somewhere, mustache twirling being optional.
But… But…. but… you don’t want your villain to be villainous! He’s a sensitive type who has a beloved pet snake he calls fuzzy. He’s cuddly. He only killed the victim because she was blackmailing him. He’s only set the space station on fire because they were mean rude and defrauded him.
Let’s not forget — looks pious — that everyone is the hero of his own story!
What rot! I swear something was seriously wrong in the 20th century that people thought this kind of boliviation denoted deep thought. Of course, everyone is a hero of his own story. And there’s only one of you. You’re the most special you there is. Which doesn’t mean “hero” means anything more than main character, or that your specialness extends deeper than your DNA and that scar behind your left ear.
I’m glad someone milked the realization that other people were self actuated and sentient into a whole play, but really! Most of us realize this when we’re three and our little male friend refuses to play dolls with us. I would say or vice-versa, but I never refused to play cars. The little SOB kept me from riding his pedal car. What? Of course I’m still salty. It’s been less than 59 years.
And while we’re at that, that’s a story to explore. Was Toi (I swear that’s what his parents called him!) a villain? Well, in my story at three he sure was. He let the little boy in our play group ride his pedal car, but he wouldn’t let me. Were there extenuating circumstances? Probably. I was really really uncoordinated at that age and I might have crashed it. Though it was one of those early sixties toys, made of metal, and there was nothing hard to crash into, so it wasn’t that big a danger. Or maybe he just didn’t like me.
Did I win over adversity? Sure. I remember standing on the patio and vowing I was going to be successful and show him.
Did I show him? LOL. I have no idea. His parents are now dead, and I don’t know if news of my being published filtered to him, or if he’d have the slightest interest (we last played together at seven.)
I think — this is my level of interest — that he was the one mom told me had been arrested for wife-beating. BUT honestly it could have been the other little boy in our group.
Not a very satisfying story, because reality normally isn’t. If I were writing it as a story, it would be a children’s story, and I’d build a little pedal car out of an old tricycle and wood, and I’d win a race with him. And he’d run away crying, which would be appropriate story-comeupance. And don’t worry, I don’t write that kind of thing.
Here’s the thing: eschew the temptation to make your villain too sympathetic. I mean, some of them have been hurt enough to spur them to action, and we can all sympathize, say, with someone who kills a blackmailer. We’re not monsters, we authors — well, not MOST of the time — so there’s a natural tendency not to want to hurt those who have already been hurt. You want to redeem them and make them feel better.
For the blackmailer question, it is absolutely possible to say “They both should lose,” because blackmail is horrible, but murder is murder, the ultimate sin and it should still be punished. (Agatha Christie threaded this needle very well more than once.)
For the “more sinned against than sinning” that’s not particularly…. satisfying. As is it not satisfying to make your murderer just “crazy” or “under the influence of drugs” or whatever excuse.
Evil exists, and if you have evil in your story, make it a worthy adversary.
And there’s support for this. Even the craziest of murderers usually know what they’re doing is very very wrong, at least in the sense of “I’ll be punished for this” and often in the sense of “This is a bad thing to do.”
Have your villain be a villain, not a wimp sucking on his thumb and apologizing. (Unless this is a comedy. Then whatever. Make it silly.)
Look, in Darkship Thieves I give more than a hint that Athena’s “dad” was extensively broken as a child, but still a snuff kink is wrong, and killing your children for their bodies is wrong too, ‘mkay. I don’t think he’s even vaguely redeemable.
In the current headache (Yeah, nearing completion on the editing, though the thyroid has gone “off” again, which necessitates a lot of doctor stuff, which eats into editing time. And writing time. This body thing is more trouble than it’s worth. Except there’s no option for going without) the villain is truly a villain who has done several despicable things, including murdering a toddler. However, he stays his hand at murdering his father. That is the threshold he can’t cross. And he has reason. He’s been extensively lied to, starting at a very early age.
Does that mean he’s redeemable? Well, I don’t think so, unless it’s a heroic moment at the end, a la Darth Vader. I mean, I suppose there could be a whole book in which he is redeemed. But then I’d need to give him another villain to fight, and he’d have to eat live frogs (not literally. Ew) and crawl over broken glass sprayed with lemon juice for most of the book before he could have a realization of what he’s done and be redeemed.
And I don’t think I even want to write that. … I don’t want to be in his head.
So… Villains?
I say yes. Have villains. Have them know their evil. And have them die (or suffer their comeuppance) in a satisfying way. Because all of us would like to, sometimes, triumph over unequivocal evil. And that’s what you’re selling your readers: triumph. A vicarious victory over those who wish us (all or particularly) evil.
The sort of non villain story, like my grudge against poor Toi? Sure, you can write that, but ultimately slightly less bad people fighting slightly less good people is what we live with, every day.
We don’t need to read about it. Most of us have co-workers.
Give the reader a good show for once.
And be a villain!
Mad Genius Club 
46 responses to “And Be A Villain”
Agreed. My usual response to people who say that their villains are their most interesting characters is: “Maybe you had better subtract your villain’s most unforgivable traits and turn him into an antihero then.”
I was originally going to say that the stuff I’ve written or planned hasn’t had many villians, when I realized, I’ve actually got a bunch of villians. They’re just not the central or most interesting characters, except for that one villian who decided they didn’t want to be a villian anymore mid plot and derailed things rather remarkably…
One of them, the villian ends up onscreen all of five minutes, where they basically get roflstomped, because the emotional weight isn’t in stopping the villian. It was in whether they could even fix what the villian had broken.
Nah. Die Hard would be a much poorer movie if Hans was an antihero instead of the villain.
As others have said: a good villain isn’t someone you love to hate, it’s someone you hate that you love.
Hans strolls in and he’s so cool, calm, competent and classy you can’t help but watch him, all the while there’s no question that he’s evil and should lose.
Heck, he’s even “sympathetic” to some degree, such as his little “I’m surrounded by idiots” moments like when he orders the other guy to shoot the glass and he doesn’t understand him because he didn’t speak it in English.
None of that makes him inherently more interesting than the McClanes or the guy John talks to over the walkie talkie. It just makes him a competent villain who’s not boring to watch, which is not at all the same thing.
C’mon, just “competent and not boring to watch?” Hans regularly makes the top 10 lists of villains in cinema.
Would you go so far as to call him more interesting than the protagonist, though? That’s what we’re discussing here, the people who talking about writing a villain so interesting that he completely drowns out their nominal protagonists. My response to them is meant as a way of saying: “maybe you should take the kind of character who interests you as your protagonist.” I prefer Red October to Die Hard when it comes to John McTiernan Christmas movies, but surely Die Hard is a case of “compelling hero with worthy opponent”, like Quigley Down Under, rather than “hero is an oxygen thief and villain steals the movie” like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Fair enough, but I love Raul Julia’s M. Bison and Frank Langella’s Skeletor, and there are plenty of other great examples where the villain steals the show. The Fu Manchu books. And the Universal Monster movies. You tune in to Dracula to see Dracula, the Mummy to see the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Wolf Man, etc.
I’m probably the wrong person to be making these arguments to. I watch my preferred versions of Dracula and the Mummy for the normies played by Peter Cushing and Brendan Fraser. I support the right of other people to watch/read Fu Manchu if they want, but I’m not interested enough to bother with him. Wolf Man, Invisible Man, and Karloff Mummy are all stories about the tragic fall of a potentially good/great man.
(It’s worth noting that as books, Dracula and Phantom of the Opera are thrillers about normies having to deal with a criminal mastermind, albeit a supernatural one in Dracula and a mad scientist/engineer in Phantom. I don’t feel like the charisma imbalance between good guys and villains is anywhere near as strong in the books as it is in some of the more popular film adaptations.)
BTW, I don’t really get this whole “MOTU movie is awful except for Skeletor” consensus. I would have to class Masters of the Universe with Flash Gordon: the head villain may be having the most fun, but the leads are pleasantly okay (maybe a bit better than that in Lundgren’s case) and the supporting cast both good and bad are very likable and charismatic in general.
There isn’t anything particularly virtuous about any of this, just faulty mental wiring on my part.
My response:
“It was Tuesday.”
And Raul Julia wins the movie.
I’ll take your word for it, since I haven’t seen it, but surely Street Fighter is another one with the reputation of being an incompetent movie with few redeeming traits beyond the villain? In other words, not storytelling to aim for.
The movie was utterly perfect for what it was, and it was everything it needed to be.
Absent everything else, the simple fact that the final fight had all the characters’ signature moves and lines from the fighting game makes my case.
But as for turning your nose up at storytelling, I defy you to find an example of a movie that manages to cram so many characters’ backstories into less than a minute before getting to the good stuff.
Again, I’ll have to take your word for it because neither the cast nor the IP interest me. But if it’s as good (or as bad in a good way) as all that, why were you hyping it as a villain vehicle earlier?
I typed a little hastily. To clarify: the fact that the characters used the same lines and signature moves from the fighting game is evidence that the movie isn’t incompetent. It knew exactly what it wanted to be, and it hit the mark flawlessly.
Streetfighter gets treated badly mostly because it’s safe to do so.
Same way that nobody takes Justice League and JLU– the 90’s animated series– with half the honor they should be given.
They’re “kid stuff,” and the adults who like them are geeks. Not socially desirable.
And yet… people buy the heck out of the movie.
A good story with fun characters doesn’t preclude the villain being the most fun.
Thought I’d conceded that particular point roundabout my muted praise for MOTU, but sure.
I would argue what makes the Phantom an interesting character is not his villainy, but his repentance.
At the end, he has everyone in his power, the girl he wanted, everything. Then he tells them to leave and brings his own world down around him.
That is what makes him an interesting character: he is the villian who won, completely, and then threw it all away. Because in the end he had not won: he had merely destroyed everything he actually cared about beyond any recovery.
I’m working on a villain who is patient, determined, and absolutely certain that the good guy is a monster who must be taken down, along with the good guy’s allies. Whatever it takes to be able to eliminate the good guy is justified, because removing monsters is necessary for society to function properly, and justice is justice.
Which … starts to sound far too much like some activists (or politicians, or religious leader, or …) and the causes they claim to espouse.
Whatever it takes to be able to eliminate the good guy is justified, because removing monsters is necessary for society to function properly, and justice is justice.
That sounds to me more like how too many writers at DC and Marvel view their main superheroes these days, what with guys like the Joker and Dr. Doom being turned into heroic rebels rather than the mad dog murderers they’ve always been shown as.
You know, I don’t think I especially like the idea of the romantic partner as the antagonist in a romance. I wonder if it is teaching a lot of young women exactly the wrong lessons about relationships?
Thinking about Black Sheep, I don’t think the couple acted as antagonists in the story at all. They had misunderstandings, but the antagonists of that story were, I want to say, the gold digging guy who was trying to charm his way into wealth. That guy is a villian, and while his humiliation felt a bit contrived, it was very well deserved.
Given how wildly popular enemies-to-lovers is in fantasy romance? It is probable, at least for some. See the adulation for the guy accused of killing the insurance exec.
Yeah. I think it comes from women really needing to know if the man they pair with is actually capable or not. So they have to see how he handles adversity.
I’m thinking the problem comes in that a lot of them get taught that *they* have to be the adversity, which, for the man, ends up making her a problem rather than a potential partner.
So star-crossed lovers can work, because she’s *not* the reason they are in conflict.
I wonder if this also sets up unreasonable expectations in men too, that women can be persuaded into relationships?
To specify “antagonist” is used in teaching people to WRITE romances, not in romances. And the idea is simple: You are trying to find your happily ever after and the object of your affections is the obstacle by misunderstanding you, being engaged to someone else, whatever.
THAT’s all it means.
Although some protagonists of romances (in my limited experience) are downright sociopathic.
The love interest is the antagonist, but some of the protagonists will happily burn down every aspect of the poor bleepard’s life to get to their “happily ever after”.
In E. L. Lyons’ Starlight Jewel, the protagonist says “Love is fierce and chaotic, as is hate. If I get a man to hate me—just a little—I’m a breath away from making him love me.”
(SJ has romance, but that is just one part of the story; it’s not a romantasy. Full disclosure: I have a personal, non-financial, interest in the book’s success.)
Indeed. And that’s one of the reasons that enemies-to-lovers works so well as a fiction trope, even in (especially in?) non-romances.
The scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han is sort of romancing ish Princess Leia, “You need more bad boys in your life” or words to that effect is what comes to mind.
I’m rather partial to stories where the villainess of one romance gets to be the main character with a romance of her own in the sequel, along with the redemption arc. It’s one of the ideas I’m playing with in my WIPs.
And by that point – the sequel – the villain is no longer an active villain anymore. She’s been ‘defeated’ by the hero and heroine of the first book getting together. She doesn’t even need to be all bad in the first one, aside from trying to keep the main characters apart for whatever reason.
Me too.
What makes the modern romance a subcategory of a love story is not only the HEA, but that the obstacles to the HEA are internal to the main characters. For instance, if the hero and the heroine belong to feuding families, the problem is not, a la Romeo and Juliet, that their families will react violently, and that the hero (or heroine) may be drawn into violence against someone the heroine (or hero) holds dear; it is that they are loyal to their families and unwilling to be drawn in, do not trust each other to not be doublecrossing, or regard their arranged marriage in an attempt to harmonize the feud as merely an arrangement and entailing no regard whatsoever.
Therefore, the agon is indeed between the two lovers.
While I don’t like the “villains are just misunderstood or really nice people” idea, what’s worse IMO is the “faceless, nameless bad guys”.
One milsf author had the soldiers on the other side as faceless (they always wore face shields) and never gave them names.
IE They existed just to be killed.
Because of this, when he gave the rebels (fighting the good guys) names, as a reader I knew the rebels would be joining forces with the good guys.
The whole “everyone is the hero of his own story” maybe trite, but I’ve seen stories where a change in POV would have you actively rooting for the other side as they desperately fought to do what they needed to protect their people even if they had to blacken their souls some to do it.
Honestly, I think that’s why I like the mid-seasons of Smallville. Lex Luthor is a human dude who witnessed an abortive alien invasion and realized that planetary subjugation or extinction was entirely possible, and that humanity had no countermeasures. He wasn’t going to let that happen, and anything nasty he did along the way could easily be justified as “if I don’t do this, everyone dies, so what price my soul”. See also Doctor Doom (“you people are all useless and there are actual threats lurking beyond the stars. Screw it, I need to take over just to keep you morons alive”).
Tell the story from their points of view, especially as we watch them go from “I really don’t want to do this but I need to” through “moralize at me *after* we win, idiots” all the way to “Bow before DOOM” and we could easily cheer them on.
That said, the stakes need to be high enough that we can see where you can see the place where necessity and morality come into conflict. And the writing needs to be *good*.
Yes, there is definitely a way to do it so it’s not grey goo. I ruined at least one story by seeing both sides too clearly but being a newbie and not knowing how to tapdance.
The Revenge of the Sith novelization by Stover had one of the best depictions I’ve ever read of someone who could genuinely go either way in Anakin. I found myself rooting for him to do the right thing, even knowing how it all ends, and I couldn’t look away.
It’s genuinely tragic, not in the sense of Anakin being a poor little victim, but in the understanding that he could have been so much better than what he became.
And in the end, there’s no getting around it or excusing it: he’s evil now. That’s what made the tragedy so poignant.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of two well-done examples of villains who struck the perfect balance between sympathetic and villainous: Magneto from the X-Men and Walternate from Fringe.
Both carry it off because they see themselves as figures in the broad sweep of things, and they genuinely believe they have to do these things for the greater good – Magneto to save the mutants and make them heirs to the world, Walternate to save his dimension at the cost of ours (he’s convinced one of the dimensions has to be destroyed, and determined that it won’t be his).
Essentially: “I have to make the hard choice so future generations wont have to.”
So there are these moments of genuine regret that they show, and if the circumstances didn’t force them into it then they wouldn’t be doing these things.
But at the same time, as long as they’re damning themselves, they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, so why not take a moment to target some of the people they don’t like and get a little bit of revenge in the process? And wielding power to do that can be fun…
It’s a tough balance to strike, but very effective if you pull it off.
To be fair, the “faceless enemy troops” in media are usually to keep the audience from noticing they’re the same six stuntmen in every shot.
I think in all of my historicals I have had maybe four out and out or sort-of villains; the dysfunctional father in the Trilogy and preludes was a man driven over the edge by grief at the losses of two people he loved, and anger at those who had survived. In the Gold Rush adventure, there was a briefly mentioned murderer, but also a charming and wholly amoral rogue who drove a couple of chapters of the plot. The other two were basically psychopaths – who only appeared briefly to provide a motivation for the heroine. The amoral rogue was fun to write, actually.
Villains should be fairly complex if you plan on using them for an extended period of time. The reader should ‘get’ them, understand why they do what they do and why they think that is the right thing. If done right, the readers will cheer on the villains (a little) as they go, know why they have to be defeated, and grieve a little when they go. Darth Vader was a perfect example of this, something Lucas did so right in the first three movies.
Some of us discussed this briefly elsewhere.
My take is that “antagonist” and “protagonist” describe a character’s function in the story with reference to the character’s morals; “villain” and “hero” describe the character’s moral stance with no reference to the character’s story function; and the utter failure of literary analysis that uses “antagonist” and “villain” or “protagonist” and “hero” as interchangeable and synonyms is why people had to invent term like “anti-hero”.
No, you don’t have a hero who is justified in his actions no matter how vile because he’s “the hero”, you have a villain protagonist.
THIS.
Don’t forget “anti-villain,” which after watching three videos about I’m still not sure what they mean it to mean.
But I’m using it for the guy who is a Designated Villain when he doesn’t actually do anything villainous.
that works for the people who cause trouble for the couple in romances. At least most of the time.
Doctor Horrible.
Doctor Inferno.
I think the term antihero has more to do with the changing nature of heroism than literary analysis, at least directly. Achilles and Odysseus are antiheroes, as are most other pre-Christian heros.
Granted, literary analysis wanted a way to describe it beyond “pathos depends on the audience, and it can still be a rollicking good yarn if pathos is lost”.
Antivillain is tougher, because it’s mostly used for “a villain I don’t hate” except that ostensibly good antagonists who you do actively hate also qualify (looking at you, Inspector Javert). So it basically means any antagonist that hasn’t forgone his humanity.
Except that Hannibal Lector has done exactly that, and is often considered an antivillain (and evidently caused his author to fall madly in love with him). So… (shrug)
Most armies at war paint the enemy as the ultimate evil, but did soldiers in the ranks think of their counterparts that way? I don’t know. I never was in that situation. But the soldiers must at the very least think that killing the enemy is better than being killed. Unless you’re writing something very, very strange.
Well, I’ve read Bill Mauldin’s ‘Up Front’ about his time with the US troops vis-a-vis the Germans in WW2 Italy , and ‘Quartered Safe out Here’ by Fraser when he fought with the British Army in Burma, and both of them were pretty clear that they and the troops hated the guys on the other side. I recall one of them saying, “Nobody is going to love the guy who’s trying to kill them like they did his buddies.”
Many people do not structure their stories into hero vs. villains but think only of the practical side of things. Or they think of themselves as the only clever guy among the suckers.
One of my favorite noir westerns, Desperado by Clifton Adams, is a brilliantly constructed piece (particularly for a 1950s paperback original, since it was likely written at speed) following a rough but likeable Texas teenager as, from his view, he gets pushed into outlawry. First, he was on the losing side of the Civil War. Then, the local sheriff (a carpetbagger if I’m remembering correctly) has it in for him. And step by relentless step, he goes further outside of acceptable society until, near the end, he approaches the girl he’s been pinning his hopes on from the beginning, and she recoils in fear of him, and he suddenly realizes he is the bad guy. (Whoops, spoilers.)