Villains, Part 2

Wow, people in comments have already covered a lot of what I was going to say about villains in this one. I still have a few things to add, though…

Starting with: What kind of villain suits your story?

If you’re writing The Lord of the Rings, and Morgoth and Sauron are essentially successive avatars of Evil (and don’t ever confront any of the current characters in person and onstage), you don’t need to delve into their motives. They’re classic examples of the “they’re evil just because that’s what they are.” This works largely because they spend the novel offstage, so readers have to depend on what the good-guy characters know about them.

Many stories aren’t suited to a totally-evil-just-because type of villain. Which means the author has to figure out plausible motives for the villain’s actions that the reader will understand while still thinking they are wrong. I’m talking here about villains, as distinct from antagonists who aren’t actually villainous. The “villain” who accidentally and unknowingly does something that is considered a mortal insult in some other culture, and who compounds the error by winning the resulting duel and killing the insulted party, has not really done anything villainous.

Note that the thing that makes the “villain” an antagonist in the above example is a combination of knowledge, motivation, and the amount of sympathy the author decides to try to coax out of the readers. If the author chooses to make the character a hapless doofus who is always blundering into awkward situations, more readers are likely to sympathize. If the author makes the character an obnoxiously entitled tourist, fewer readers are likely to sympathize (though in this example, the character would have to be amazingly obnoxious in order to cross the line into “villain” on that alone).

To make the character a true villain, the author needs to get rid of the “accidentally and unknowingly” part of the scenario. If the character deliberately and in full knowledge commits the mortal insult, because they intend to kill the insulted party in the duel, they look a lot more villainous (though if they have a good enough reason for wanting to kill the person they’re insulting—say, revenge for a heinous crime that person got away with—they may still be sympathetic from a reader’s perspective). The more reprehensible the villain’s ultimate goal, and the less careful the villain is about damaging any bystanders or innocent parties, the more villainous they look, even if they always remember their Mom’s birthday and make regular contributions to the animal shelter.

Villains are judged on what they’re trying to do, why they’re trying to do it, and how they go about achieving their goal. Authors can adjust each aspect of this trio to make their antagonist range from a sympathetic almost-hero to a vile representative of everything evil.

First, what is the antagonist/villain trying to do? What’s his end goal? Villains can do horrible things in the service of admirable causes, as well as in pursuit of selfish goals. A villain who plans to achieve world domination is not likely to be as sympathetic as one who wants to end world hunger. A character who intends to murder one person is probably not going to be judged as harshly as one who plans to deliberately start a war.

Second, why does the villain want to do this? The more selfish the character’s reasons, the worse they appear. A character who does bad things for what the reader would consider good reasons can be extremely sympathetic (to the point of not being villainous at all). A character who causes evil out of ignorance or by accident is usually not considered a villain on that basis alone (especially if they are horrified by the result of their actions). It’s only if the character continues to behave badly (because it benefits them, or its easier, or they’ve gotten used to it)—that is, when the character moves from ignorance/accidental behavior to consciously refusing to change—that they become villainous.

Finally, how is the villain going to go about achieving their goal? How dangerous is their plan for everyone else? The larger the number of people who will be negatively affected (especially people who are considered particularly vulnerable), the more villainous the character appears. The character who cheats at solitaire isn’t hurting anyone else and really isn’t villainous at all, while the character who is preparing to cheat their partner in a business deal had better have a good motive and a noble end goal if they want to avoid villainy. Rigging the lottery in order to get one’s hands on the ten million dollar prize is probably less villainous than kidnapping a billionaire’s ten-year-old daughter and demanding ransom money. On the other hand, a character who plans to achieve world domination by cornering the paper clip market seems more ridiculous than evil.

Tweaking these three aspects of the story can fine-tune how sympathetic or villainous a character seems. There is, however, a limit to how sympathetic and understandable an author can make a villain character before readers start rooting for him/her. Villains who are exceptionally clever, exceptionally charming, or just a lot of fun can also end up transcending the “villain” label. This can be either a feature or a bug, depending on the story the author wants to write.