Villains

I really like villains. Villains have style. I’ve always been one of those people more interested in the bad guys than the good. I cheered for Darth Vader and cried when he turned good at the end of Return of the Jedi. (Spoiler alert.) He could have just struck Luke down! Then no one would stand against him! As a child, too, I grew annoyed with the villains of Gotham for always letting Batman get away, instead of shooting him in the damn head once they had him in their clutches, like a sensible person. Of course, I don’t think I really got it, back then. That they were all, you know, mentally ill; that the game was more important than winning; that they were compelled to stick to their shtick. Still, I loved them, those villains. They were my kind of people.

So I find it difficult to write villains. Generally, my “villains” are concepts (writers’ block, poverty, disease, capitalism) rather than people. I try to throw in a detective to catch my artistic vandals and suddenly he’s interesting and I get attached to him. Because villains are just people, really. Complex people, with the same faults and flaws as your average protagonist. Magnified, possibly, but still. The original villain – the detective – is just a representative of the overarching antagonist, the police state (or whathaveyou). He’s just a man doing his job. And if he’s just a total cock who curb-stomps suspects for no reason, he’s one-dimensional and a poor character. (To call that sort of character “cartoonish” does a terrific disservice to actual cartoon villains.)

The film Megamind did a good job of it. Your protagonist is a villain, playing the classic game with the resident hero. When he actually manages to kill the hero and, bored with his new life of evil overlordship, creates a new hero to battle, that hero is the film’s antagonist. And he’s a great antagonist. Like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, you really hate this guy. Because you’ve met this guy. He’s a cunt who thinks he’s entitled to a woman’s attention, and turns into a murderous shit when he doesn’t get it. Gaston and Titan start out as very different people – Gaston is popular and sexy, Titan is an overweight nerd. But neither of them understand the concept of boundaries, neither of them are that interested in their “ideal woman” as a person. They’re creeps and they’re easy to hate.

I have trouble writing a villain I can hate. Sooner or later they become someone the protagonist might clash with, but someone they can nevertheless win over in some way. They become Jaime Lannisters: technically a villain (he did push Bran out a window) but you can’t help but love the guy. Cersei is even more complex in that way: sometimes you want to punch her in the face, sometimes you admire her. I suppose I ought to aim for Ramsay Bolton.

What about Mass Effect and the Reapers? I think ME did things very well, actually. Here is a race of near-immortal sentient machines, so far beyond comprehension, with a motive that, yes, kind of makes sense. Their overall goal is to preserve organic life, by averting the Robot War that is the subject of so much science fiction. They do this by “harvesting” sentient races that are sufficiently advanced to create synthetic lifeforms that may then go on to wipe out all organic life. So… nice goal, and all, but I’d rather not be hideously mutated or destroyed, if it’s all the same to you. This makes them a great villain. They’re sufficiently alien that it’s difficult to empathise with them. They’re removed enough that they can’t empathise themselves; we are so tiny to them that that would be “beneath them”. Great villains. Very arrogant (with, admittedly, good reason) and therefore very satisfying to kill. They’re also terrifying. (To this day the Reaper “WAHHHH” sound sets off a flight response in my lizard brain.)

Perhaps I should do more to channel video games when considering potential villains. “Satisfying to kill” is the goal. Arrogance is a good quality for a villain to have because thwarting them is all the more satisfying, and it gives them a substantial flaw for the protagonist to exploit. In my own work, that’s difficult for me; that childhood “don’t leave him there! just shoot him!” mindset comes back into play. I don’t want my villains to be stupid or careless. But the problem is that intelligent, sensible people are hard to kill. So Hannibal Lecter turns, naturally, from a thriller’s villain to a gothic romance’s hero.

And oh yes, I love Hannibal Lecter. He has style.

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