Heroes and Villains

One of the bits of writing wisdom that crops up quite often is that writers find villains more fun to write than heroes. The usual reason given for this is that villains have flaws and are therefore more complex and interesting characters than your typical hero.

This may have been true sixty or seventy years ago, but I don’t think that rationale holds up today. Modern heroes and heroines don’t have to be flawless, shiny characters who are Good Guys through and through and always have been. They can make mistakes, both in story-past and story-present; they can have major weaknesses; they can be tempted by power or status or sex … and give in; they can, on occasion, do the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons.

This being so, what’s the difference between hero-characters and villain-characters?

It depends.

The first thing it depends on is the writer’s attitude toward heroes and villains. I once watched a fascinating discussion/argument between two writers, one of whom believed deeply and sincerely in the type of hero/villain divide that was common in older pulp fiction: for him, every book required a Good Guy whose flaws could only be minor things like being clumsy (and never, ever anything that might reflect on his moral character, like lying, even in a good cause), and a Villain who was irredeemably evil and morally bankrupt, who needed no reason to murder, plunder, or torture other than being eeeeevil and who had no sympathetic qualities whatsoever.

The other writer could not, for the life of him, write characters who did things for no reason besides a) the plot requires it and b) they’re eeeeevil. His “villains” had rational goals and reasons for their actions; most of them even had good qualities, like loving and wanting to protect their families. His “heroes” were likewise not pure white cardboard – they had serious flaws, made mistakes, and occasionally did things that were expedient rather than admirable.

According to Writer A, Writer B’s books were terrible (and possibly immoral) because they didn’t follow the required Hero/Villain formula and encouraged readers to sympathize and/or understand Evil (i.e., the Villain). According to Writer B, Writer A’s books were terrible because their characters were unrealistic and unbelievable.

From where I sat, both of them were right…and wrong. They were right about what kinds of books they each personally liked to read and preferred to write; they were each wrong in trying to make the other writer accept that their way was the only right and proper way to handle heroes and villains. This becomes especially evident as soon as you step outside the particular SF adventure genre they were both writing.

A Romance heroine who has a Writer-A Hero and Villain as her suitors is going to look idiotic for even considering the Villain unless there’s blackmail involved. If it’s a Villainess who’s the competition, the Hero is going to look equally idiotic for being deceived by her pathetic attempts to appear like a normal person rather than a raging psycopath. And it’s pretty hard to make the cannibalistic zombies in a horror novel into complex characters (OK, zombies are more of a force-of-nature-antagonist than a classic villain, but they’re still pure evil and hard to make complex without totally violating their zombie-ness).

Fiction is wide and sprawling and can cover pretty much anything a given writer wants it to, even when you break it down into genres and subgenres. You have to get all the way down into very tiny niche markets before you can apply a formula like “Good Hero/Evil Villain” to all the books in it, and even then, I can just about guarantee that there is an equally tiny niche market right next door that uses the opposite formula.

What this means is that if you really love the classic Hero/Villain setup, go ahead and write it. You aren’t required to make your villain reasonable or give him good qualities – he can be a revoltingly psychopathic serial killer if that’s what you want. Equally, you’re not required to make your main character a flawless Good Guy and his/her antagonist the embodiment of Evil. If you want to write complex, flawed characters who each have reasonable goals that are mutually exclusive, you can.