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  • Hey gang, a writing question!

    I've had this debate over at CYS and I'm currently having it at CoG as well, so I might as well bring it up here too.

    Do you guys feel the absolute need for the main villain of a story/movie/whatever to be a multi-layered character?

    This isn't to say complex villains aren't great things because they are, but to a certain extent I keep seeing people demanding that this always be the case. Like the villain always has to have some deep reason for being evil otherwise he just sucks.

    My thing is, can't you just have a perfectly good villain who doesn't whine and cry about how he's evil because he didn't get hamburger helper as a child and just gets on with the whole puppy kicking and baby murdering?

    Really, I'm satisfied with the evil overlord being completely drunk on the dark side as he's plotting the downfall of civilization. I don't need to hear him complain about how he didn't get enough hugs (or too many hugs) as a kid.

    Some people are just evil assholes and there is no deeper reason than that or even if there is, does it even fucking matter if it isn't relevant to the story in some way?

    This also brings up the other thing which is more of a thing in fantasy or scifi settings which is the "evil race." I guess a lot of people dislike the idea of a race that is automatically "evil." (Like the usual orc for example)

    Again my thing is, why does it really matter that an entire race is considered "evil?" If they're the enemy in a story and there really isn't any greater purpose for them than that, do you really need to know if they're good fathers to their orc children and work at orc charities back home?

    You're reading it from the point of view of the protagonist (Who we're assuming is human for this example) all he knows is that orcs have been warring with humans for centuries and have consistently been hostile. In his eyes they're all "evil."

    Yes, we as the readers might ponder the philosophical question of whether or not orcs have normal families like the humans and if they're only raiding due to survival, but unless the story is actually addressing both sides (And in the process making the orcs "sympathetic") again, does it really matter?

    And besides all that, if its a fantasy or scifi setting anyway, the morality doesn't need to be realistic. You can have all the pure good or pure evil races you want, just make the overall story interesting.
    Writing: It's more fun than a barrel of Ebola ridden monkeys!

  • #2
    For the most part - if you're going to have a "villain" - that character has motivations, some kind of rationale for what they're doing. Sometimes they have better reasons for acting than your protagonist, who's often still trying to figure things out. You don't have to include those things, but I feel like the story loses a lot of potential if you don't.

    Some people are just evil assholes and there is no deeper reason than that or even if there is, does it even fucking matter if it isn't relevant to the story in some way?
    I don't agree. There's always a justification. Characters with enough authority and will to move your story along - your Hitler or bin Laden - they're always striving for something. Without explication, they act without reason, and your protagonist defeats them - or fails - out of ignorance. You have the opening, climax, and denouement. What you don't have is a story. Your reader confronts a two-dimensional plot device, and the results are predictable.


    “Admit it,” I said. “I nearly had you that last time.”

    He merely scowled and pointed imperiously to the table.

    I set to it with a will, smiling and humming, sure that today I would finally beat him.

    But nothing could be further from the truth. Bredon set his stones ruthlessly, not a breath of hesitation between his moves. He tore me apart as easily as you rip a sheet of paper in half.

    The game was over so quickly it left me breathless.

    “Again,” Bredon said, a note of command in his voice I’d never heard before.

    I tried to rally, but the next game was worse. I felt like a puppy fighting a wolf. No. I was a mouse at the mercy of an owl. There was not even the pretence of a fight. All I could do was run.

    But I couldn’t run fast enough. This game was over sooner than the last.

    “Again,” he demanded.

    And we played again. This time, I was not even a living thing. Bredon was calm and dispassionate as a butcher with a boning knife. The game lasted about the length of time it takes to gut and bone a chicken.

    At the end of it Bredon frowned and shook his hands briskly to both sides of the board, as if he had just washed them and was trying to flick them dry.

    “Fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I take your point. You’ve been going easy on me.”

    “No,” Bredon said with a grim look. “That is far gone from the point I am trying to make.”

    “What then?”

    “I am trying to make you understand the game,” he said. “The entire game, not just the fiddling about with stones. The point is not to play as tight as you can. The point is to be bold. To be dangerous. Be elegant.”

    He tapped the board with two fingers. “Any man that’s half awake can spot a trap that’s laid for him. But to stride in boldly with a plan to turn it on its ear, that is a marvelous thing.” He smiled without any of the grimness leaving his face. “To set a trap and know someone will come in wary, ready with a trick of their own, then beat them. That is twice marvelous.”

    Bredon’s expression softened, and his voice became almost like an entreaty. “Tak reflects the subtle turning of the world. It is a mirror we hold to life. No one wins a dance, boy. The point of dancing is the motion that a body makes. A well-played game of tak reveals the moving of a mind. There is a beauty to these things for those with eyes to see it.”

    He gestured at the brief and brutal lay of stones between us. “Look at that. Why would I ever want to win a game such as this?”

    I looked down at the board. “The point isn’t to win?” I asked.

    “The point,” Bredon said, “is to play a beautiful game.” He lifted his hands and shrugged, his face breaking into a beatific smile. “Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?”
    ...when I was younger, one of my favorite authors wrote the kind of story you're describing. It spanned two books, maybe a thousand pages. At the time it was interesting, a good read. Over the next year and half, he put out two more novels, from the point of view of the "opposition." If you read both sets, you understood both sides. There was no "good" or "evil." A decent story became a complete and honest world.

    I guess it's down to the effort you're willing to spend, and the scope and disposition of your narrative. There's room for the evil antagonist you're talking about, sure. I just feel like something significant gets left out when I see one of those. I think a lot of people act - in the real world - against the kind of evil you're describing. People die, and nothing changes. Blame it on the other guy, the barbarian.

    People enjoy a two-dimensional fight, to a point (have you been to the movies lately? Any of them starting to feel a little stale?).

    I don't think the kind of evil you're talking about exists. It doesn't make sense to me. The complexity of the story collapses, and you're left with a "storygame," something shallow. I'm not saying that's always wrong; meaning is relative. If the story itself is authentic and moving, fine. I think that happens more often with developed characters, though - antagonists, not villains.
    Last edited by Locke; 06-27-2014 at 12:16 AM.

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    • #3
      In the immortal words of Dr. Gonzo, "Some people are just basically rotten."

      Most assuredly that sucks, to paraphrase from your readers' reactions when it turns out a villain has no redeeming qualities. Most assuredly that is also the point: there are people who defy understanding, who refuse to behave in a socially acceptable fashion, who are capable of great cruelty and who often seem to behave this way just as naturally as they get dressed in the morning or walk down the street. Such is the great, terrifying variety of our species, and it would seem a pity for several reasons to muzzle the possibilities of the Villain without a Cause:
      • There is great historical precedent for the inscrutable baddie - In much early literature and drama, evil played a strictly symbolic role, finding its expression in human form in order to act out its predestined purpose. Such evil was understood to be inherent, and a surprisingly constant notion amongst many early philosophies and religions. Simply put: evil is. We are the ones rewriting evil by giving it a personal history and a justification, and we are the ones who will be sorely punished for hopelessly throwing ourselves against forces so much larger than ourselves. We might have an iPhone and a billion trillion Facebook friends, but when old Grimsy comes knocking, it's just you all alone on that long, long road. Death is loneliness and evil is death. Giving these Cosmic Realities a spot on Biography is nothing short of insanely funny.
      • Evil is a mystery and mysteries are beautiful - Where would literature be without mystery, without the things left unsaid, the twines left untied, the answers left unspoken? This driving need to give evil a human sob story speaks very much to our fear of incomprehension, of chaos, and, once again, of our own "mutinous shadow waves". I once saw a modernized version of MacBeth in which a single vague line from the original play was morphed into a long Daily Mail-style tearjerker about her miscarried baby and how poor Lady Mac just wasn't the same after that. Lines which once symbolically enabled her to sacrifice her femininity in order to commit murder in a man's world were turned into a nauseating stew, abusively smeared on the proud countenance of one of literature's greatest villains, stripping her of her dignity by means of that horror known as banality.
      • Evil is not a cult of personality - What a silly, egotistical world we must live in if we think even the forces of darkness are somehow tameable. We kid ourselves into believing we are being understanding when we decide a villain isn't really a villain because he was beaten as a child. What we are really doing is far more insidious. We are declawing the beast, inoculating it so that we can assert our own control. The ancient Greeks knew better than to try this. In Aristotle's Poetics, evil is as true to its nature as good to its own; both are equally immutable.
      • Evil is possibility - Evil is a brave new world, an unexplored frontier, an ever-changing landscape of such breathtaking dimension. Why would we ever want to limit it, box it, pre-define it, and therein cheat ourselves of its innumerable gifts? It seems, for creative people, evil earns a place of particularly high esteem for providing us with so many of our best moments and muses. This too has historical precedent and should not be forgotten by anyone merely wanting the narrative equivalent of a couch upon which to feel comfy.


      As for evil races, that is quite clearly the most politically loaded issue you've mentioned. Tolkien did indeed wage his brave little war against the Modern World with his armies of indistinguishable orcs and other creatures perverted beyond the soul-state into something so odious it became one's Christian, I mean, moral duty, to eliminate them. Such ideas have not aged particularly well. But that's all there is to it. There's nothing to stop you from reworking the notion of the evil race or in fact just leaving it alone at the risk that your writing might seem, oh for horrors, a tad referential to what came before, a tad old-fashioned. Besides, it is an act of unmitigated arrogance to impose the hot topics of the moment on the past, so I personally enjoy watching certain of the more self-absorbed elements getting just the teensiest bit backed up when you step on their historical-symbolical toes. No one should ever become complacent in their victimhood, no more than they should become complacent in their certainty of who and what is evil.

      And since all good writing threads must end with a reading recommendation, here's mine for a great book about an utterly inscrutable dude prone to all sorts of nastiness: Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars. Maybe the trick is to lead by example. Rather than talk oneself blue in the face trying to convince people who probably aren't really listening anyway, send them in the right literary direction, be that to ancient tomes, modernist masterpieces or your own striking examples of the absolutely unaccountable villain.
      My sanity, my soul, or my life.

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      • #4
        The Joker, arguably the best-loved villain in fiction; doesn't even have an origin story. He's told a million of them, probably none of them are true. No one knows why he's evil and crazy, we just know that he's evil and crazy.

        I'm not a fan of orcs/goblins/whatnot; but it's more because I hate the "look how many sentient races there are" aspect of most fantasy than because they're evil. I'm not really a fan of elves, dwarves, halflings/hobbits, and gnomes either.

        I do enjoy a good, well rounded villain... But it kind of depends on how central he/she is to the story. If we're going to read about him/her a shit-ton, I would like some background. But if we're just going to see the aftermath of what (s)he's done and kind of encounter him/her only a few times; then I don't care about the background.
        The organ is grinding but the monkey won't dance.

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        • #5
          I think it's a mistake to confuse a good villain with one that has "some deep reason for being evil." A villain has to be interesting, twirling mustache or no. It's just the case that, a lot of the time, people write shitty mustache-twirlers.

          That said, I do tend to prefer that characters not be flat. I like them to come off like real people, not some caricature (the latter being a common shortcoming for heroes and villains both). They can be rotten real people, but if it's transparently obvious they have no existence outside of their role in the story, that's just more of that shitty writing I was talking about. But I suppose you can get away with this more with your low-level mook who's only in one or a handful of scenes than you can your Dark Lord figure.

          Length of the text might also factor in. Howard's Conan stories are good to read in one sitting, usually, and often have fairly shallow antagonists, but are still enjoyable (at least for me). However, even he has villainous characters who are occasionally more than meets the eye, or heroes who ponder the philosophical side of things, as with Kull.

          I'd also very much like to know what series Locke is referring to.

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          • #6
            I'd also very much like to know what series Locke is referring to.
            Modesitt's Recluce saga. Specifically the Engineer, The White Order, and Colors of Chaos. The writing is nothing like Rothfuss's two novels, though - which I keep referencing because his prose is just that good. The second book had its flaws, but still very engaging; at no point was I bored. If you know others like that, do recommend them.

            Of Recluce - and the perspective I was talking about - there are probably better examples, although I haven't seen that done often. The writing appealed to me when I was younger, but either I read the books too often, or raised the bar for prose quality over the years, probably some of each. Anyway, the writing hasn't aged as well as it might have. If it was me, I'd steal one and read a chunk of it just to try it out.

            Of course, I read Kvothe's story in pdf form, and I sort of wish I'd gone for the paperback version. If the book is engaging, the aesthetic quality is just that much better. Enough that I feel like it adds significantly to the story.

            I'll read short fiction online all day, though. It lends itself to tabbed browsing, ready to be switched to when I feel like a break from whatever. It's also prohibitively frustrating to cull a selection of short stories from a bunch of in-print magazines, which need to be bought and paged through individually.

            ...but then reading the online stuff leads to a list of favorite authors whose work is mostly bound up in said magazines and can't be acquired in any other way.
            Last edited by Locke; 06-27-2014 at 12:16 AM.

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            • #7
              Hnnh.

              I suppose making your protagonist sulk about the flatness of his enemy could make for an alternative fourth-wall rant about the scarcity of absolutely 2D antagonists.

              Or would it?

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              • #8
                No, it wouldn't. meta jokes and 4th wall breaking doesn't really mesh well with unfathomable evil.

                That said, thanks for bumping this, it's a great thread that I completely missed somehow. I'll probably have an opinion on the OP later when I'm more awake.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Vedrisca View Post
                  I suppose making your protagonist sulk about the flatness of his enemy could make for an alternative fourth-wall rant about the scarcity of absolutely 2D antagonists.

                  Or would it?
                  Could work in a Noir type setting where you've got one of those hard boiled PIs going on a monologue about how the hired mooks he always has to deal with are always the same.

                  "I lit up a cigarette after my latest dust up with a couple of hired mooks. I took a puff and its sweet sweet carcinogens full my lungs.

                  I swear I've been on hundreds of cases and these guys are always the same. Big, dumb and hostile. It's like there's a factory somewhere that just mass produces these guys to make my life harder.

                  I guess it's right next to the factory that produces all those buxom blonde dames that come in my office to hire me to fix some problem for them…and to make my life harder.

                  Takes all types I suppose. I dunno. I'm not here to make sense of it, I'm just here to find some damn platinum gecko statue."
                  Last edited by End Master; 01-02-2015, 11:43 PM.
                  Writing: It's more fun than a barrel of Ebola ridden monkeys!

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by End Master View Post
                    Some people are just evil assholes and there is no deeper reason than that or even if there is, does it even fucking matter if it isn't relevant to the story in some way?
                    I think 'relevant to the story' is the key here. If the evil asshole is the main character's estranged brother or whatever, then yeah, exploring their motivations and what happened to change him into that would probably be an important part of the story. But if from the character's perspective the villain is just some random warlord riding around enslaving people and burning villages to the ground, why should they give a shit about his inner pain or how many hugs he did or did not receive as a child, all they would see is a monster that needed to be stopped.

                    I mean, hell, if I just walked into your house one day brandishing a gun, would you and your family go 'hmm okay I wonder, what is mizal's motivation for this inappropriate behavior? Maybe she's been the real victim all along. yes we're upset that she just shot Endmaster in the face but before calling the police let's take some time to learn her life story because I'm sure it's very interesting and deep how it all led to this moment'

                    And on the subject of evil fantasy races, again, it's all a matter of perspective and what the story is focused on. Is the character starting an orphanage for orc babies or are they just a guy that's getting attacked by orc warriors? If the latter than I think the story can be forgiven for not lingering on the philosophical questions of whether it's okay to cause some orc dad's children to starve by denying them of all the dinners they'd be able to make from your ample carcass.

                    I'm also pretty tired of the 'horrible monster was actually just misunderstood, perhaps we were the real monsters all along' cliche that goes hand in hand with this kind of thing. Even though I admit that one of my favorite things in any kind of fiction ever is that plot where the bad guy has to team up with the good guys and gradually becomes a good guy himself and blah blah blah, so damn cheesy but I love it!

                    So don't get me wrong, complex villains are great and all, but they're not necessary to tell a good story--you can tell a good story without any villain at all!--and the fact is they've been stealing the spotlight for far too long. If I had to choose one or the other I'd rather have a complex and interesting protagonist. Now that is an endangered species.

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by mizal View Post
                      Even though I admit that one of my favorite things in any kind of fiction ever is that plot where the bad guy has to team up with the good guys and gradually becomes a good guy himself and blah blah blah, so damn cheesy but I love it!
                      In one of ur last posts yeuu mentioned that while still femayle, ueur preference was for the male variety of the species. Ever seen the BBC version of Robin Hood from the mid '00s? The super-hot baddie gets together with the also-respectably-hot goodie and together they go rescue the brother they never knew they had, who is basically a dead ringer for Errol Flynn. Just in case, you know, you were wanting to further research your favorite trope and all.

                      Originally posted by mizal View Post
                      I'd rather have a complex and interesting protagonist. Now that is an endangered species.
                      Fucking A, I am so sick of all the Mary Sue's, Harry Stu's and just plain Brain Deads ruling the shelves and interwebs. Bring back Bovary and Caulfield, Kate Croy and Lord Jim, Aschenbach and the BFG!
                      My sanity, my soul, or my life.

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by mizal View Post
                        Is the character starting an orphanage for orc babies or are they just a guy that's getting attacked by orc warriors?
                        Actually, I would welcome the opportunity to read a story about an orphanage for orc babies...

                        Originally posted by Vesnic View Post
                        Fucking A, I am so sick of all the Mary Sue's, Harry Stu's and just plain Brain Deads ruling the shelves and interwebs. Bring back Bovary and Caulfield, Kate Croy and Lord Jim, Aschenbach and the BFG!
                        Ves, let me take this opportunity to say that I the allusions to higher literature and cinema that you share on this forum. Sometimes I wonder if you don't feel like you're speaking way over everybody's head and are a little isolated for it, but I, for one, am happy whenever I get to delve into the things you mention that I'm not already familiar with. And while I have at least a passing knowledge of most of the things above, "BFG" escapes me. :\

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                        • #13
                          I thought BFG stood for 'Big Fucking Gun' so I'm confused to. Unless Ves is saying a big fucking gun would make for a great protagonist to a story, in which case...well, I can't say I disagree.

                          And I'll have to look up that show she mentioned. The only Robin Hoods I'm currently familiar with are the Kevin Costner Robin Hood, the Mel Brooks Robin Hood that's a parody of it, and then there's the one that's a cartoon fox.

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by dreamshell View Post
                            Ves, let me take this opportunity to say that I the allusions to higher literature and cinema that you share on this forum. Sometimes I wonder if you don't feel like you're speaking way over everybody's head and are a little isolated for it, but I, for one, am happy whenever I get to delve into the things you mention that I'm not already familiar with. And while I have at least a passing knowledge of most of the things above, "BFG" escapes me. :\
                            There are lots of things in my life that make me feel a little or a lot isolated, but pontificating from the treetops isn't usually one of them, mostly because my enthusiasm for these things is completely ingrained and would stay much the same whether I had the whole world wrapped around my every word or was just walking down the street talking crazily to myself. That's very kind of you, though, and I'm glad if my ramblings here have sparked or re-sparked your interest in some of life's better offerings.

                            As for the BFG, that was just meant to be sort of a funny non-sequitur, a reference to Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant!


                            Originally posted by mizal View Post
                            Unless Ves is saying a big fucking gun would make for a great protagonist to a story, in which case...well, I can't say I disagree.
                            Hmm. You might very well have just saved my ass for my contest story.
                            My sanity, my soul, or my life.

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