One of the things you see a lot in fantasy stories is a villain who is purely and simply evil and knows it. No rationalizations, no semi-plausible rationales, not even a rotten childhood to blame it on, just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over The World Because He Is Really, Really Evil. There are ways of making such a character work — one would be to present him as a sociopath — but they are limited in number, and they are difficult to pull off.
Most of the time, the thoroughly Evil Dark Lord comes off as a cardboard character, because he doesn’t have any reason for what he does except “a lust for power.” And “a lust for power” alone just doesn’t seem like sufficient reason, since there are a great many ways of getting vast quantities of personal and/or political power without murdering and torturing and so on (and those ways have the added benefit that one is far more likely to retain a few friends who actually trust one). Which is why it is so important both to come up with the real reasons why one’s villain is trying to conquer the world, commit genocide, kill the hero, and swipe the very last chocolate chip cookie, and also to come up with the rationalizations that he is using to justify doing all these evil things.
A possible solution for this difficulty is to deliberately look at the other side of the villain. What are his/her good points? What does the story look like from his/her perspective — that is, the same events are happening, but seen through his/her eyes, the “villain” is the real hero (and the eventual success of the “hero” of the original version is a tragedy)? And best of all: what is the one thing that the villain loves madly and would be much too ashamed to ever, ever admit in public (like reading comic books or romances, or watching Weekly World Wrestling, or buying The National Enquirer)? In other words…what are all the things that make the villain a human being, and not just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over etc. (Someday, I am going to write a Dark Lord whose secret vice is that he loves pro wrestling…not this week, though.)
What do you do to make your villains real characters?
Hey, if you ever decide to write a story with that pro-wrestling loving villain, I’d read it!
I think villains are tough to write. One way to handle villains (which I learned from reading a small ton of mysteries) is to introduce the villain early but not make it clear that the person is bad, and let their evil side gradually emerge. I just learned this trick, so I haven’t practiced it much, but when it works, it’s really sinister. 🙂
Someday, just for fun, I’d like to write a story about a small band of generic heroes in a generic fantasy setting… who discover that the annoying comic relief character is secretly the Evil Dark Lord.
I love sincerely misinformed characters. In a dungeon I had an NPC character (rescued from stasis) who tested as (and was) intelligent Lawful Good, a beautiful person, a trustworthy guide….
Well into the game the players caught on: “She keeps getting us in trouble because her information is 300 years out of date!”
(Thanks to those who helped me about the RSS feed.)
I don’t have villains, I have antagonists. I’m not interested in grand battles between Good and Evil. Not just are cardboard villains boring, they often make for boring stories. I like ambiguity. I like it when characters have to balance a number of things with their main goal. I like it when they have to make tough decisions.
When you have an evil, evil villain threatening to destroy the whole world, those shades of grey get wiped out, and not going forward is not an option for any right-thinking protagonist.
Green_knight–You can still have plenty of tough choices with a Purely Evil Villain; they’re just not the same kind of choices. And some folks prefer nice, clear-cut battles between Good and Evil. Boring is in the eye of the beholder (in other words, it’s a matter of taste). Sometimes I’m just not in the mood for ambiguity.
But on the whole, yeah, I prefer characters who are more real/realistic/complicated, even (or especially) for villains. Though one problem with that is that a really complicated villain quite often takes over the story!
Ultimate Evil works in Deltora Quest. Of course, there are a lot of minor villains to keep up the interest -and Emily Rodda is just brilliant, which helps.
The villain in the novel I’m outlining is a schemer, murder and a heartless woman, but then again so is everyone in her class, so it’s perfectly acceptable behaviour. 😉
Alex–But what does she do for fun? Doesn’t she have any secret vices, like, oh, knitting baby clothes for homeless mothers, that would be totally disapproved of in her society/class but that she loves and does anyway? I mean, nobody’s perfect…
Well, this might not be relevant, but…
I couldn’t help thinking of Roderick Spode, who does plan on becoming a dictator, in the Bertie Wooster books and his deep, dark secret – Eulalie… 🙂
I like my stories nuanced but with the current favor of long format books I find myself putting off beginning a new series to be able to remember the weave without needing to reread books .
And Eulalie was enough to bring him completely to heel!
What I thought of, however, was Diana Wynne Jones’ book “The Dark Lord of Derkholm” – where being the Dark Lord was an unenviable job (to say the least), which was forced onto a gentle, animal loving guy. Wonderful view of “the fantasy world” from the other side.
`Dark Lord of Derkholm’ that’s a fun book. 🙂
My favorite Jones book is ” Archer’s Goon ” .
So, what is the Head Wizard Zemenar’s secret embarrassing hobby?
(I find the Enchanted Forest Chronicles to be great travel reading. And I just finished a trip involving two 24 hour bus journeys, so I reread them ALL)
I don’t usually have a villain. Looking at everything I’ve written so far, I’m far more likely to have an internal conflict or something else that presents a problem without an actual villainy person.
Ilse–I never thought about it before, but I bet Zemenar’s embarassing secret is that he likes old, bad pulp fiction – the sort of action-adventure that’s all cheesy plot and no style or characterization, but you still can’t put it down because it’s just fun, that’s all. I think Zemenar would be horribly embarrassed to be caught reading it. He probably saves the dust jackets from respected literary novels and puts them on his pulp books and magazines so no one will figure it out.
Villains are only one kind of opposition; the whole point of the Frontier Magic trilogy I’m working on right now is that there aren’t any villains – it’s a “Man vs. Nature” story. I think. So far, anyway.