McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Writing villains
Nickeris86:
i never put my villains in a situation where I would have to write them harming a child, teenagers (16 and over) are fair game. I am ok with giving vague descriptions of the aftermath of something like that to build up how purely evil the particular son of a bitch is.
For my villains, unless they are completely alien (insane or otherworldly) in their thinking, they always have a reason. Now that reason may not make much sense or could simply be to cold and calculating for most people but its still a reason.
It also depends on how i want the audience to react to the character. If I want them to despise this guy and cheer when he gets whats coming to him then he is going to do somethings that are going to make you hate him. If i want them to sympathies with them then i work that in somehow. Then their are the ones who i want the reader to love to hate, like the Joker. No one roots for him, well no one that i would want on my Christmas card list anyway, but we love him all the same.
OZ:
Actually I can't stand the Joker but that's beside the point. I know what you are talking about. For me a villain is a villain. What he would do or how far he would go to do it would depend on his or her motivation. If he is a serial killer, he might do things that he wouldn't if he were an enemy soldier. Someone like Fidelias (codex Alera) might do horrible things because he feels it is necessary for the greater good. Another villain (antagonist is probably a better word here )might be a ruthless business man that would never physically hurt someone but has absolutely no problem leaving them and their family destitute. Like good heroes, good villains need to be more than two dimensional cardboard cutouts. They need to have reasons, whether simple or complex, for doing the things that they do. One of my gripes with the most recent movie Joker was that it was never clear to me what his motivation was (crazy may be part of the motivation but by itself it is not enough for me. )
As far as violence against women, children, the elderly, etc. it would again depend on the villains motivation. One thing that I will not do is spend a long time describing the violence being done. I, for instance, understand a book where the plot is driven by a man wanting revenge because the bad guys raped, killed and tortured his family. I don't need the author to spend 100 pages describing the brutality in glowing detail. That's one reason that I avoid a lot of horror movies.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: OZ on August 17, 2012, 02:16:33 PM ---One of my gripes with the most recent movie Joker was that it was never clear to me what his motivation was (crazy may be part of the motivation but by itself it is not enough for me. )
--- End quote ---
I never bought that he was crazy, fwiw, at least not in the whole avatar of chaos sense he loudly proclaims; what success he achieves is tied to repeatedly out-thinking and out-organising everyone else on screen. As far as motivations go, watching what he does and ignoring what he says leads me to believe he's a) convinced humanity are irredeemably horrible and b) primarily motivated by a desire to rub their noses in it, which the movie refutes when the Plain People of Gotham in the boats refuse to go along with the Joker's scheme; the one place his plans falter is with people in general being morally better than he relies on. (And a large part of what I found unsatisfying about Dark Knight Rises is the total undercutting of that.)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Aminar on August 17, 2012, 03:08:13 AM ---There aren't logical philosophical differences too deep to compromise in an altruistic morality. Compromise can always be made if everyone works towards the concept of compromise.
--- End quote ---
Consider this, then. Group A get hold of time-travel technology. Group A see this as an opportunity to prevent historical atrocities, and set about doing so. Group B note that the changes group A make to prevent atrocities will have other, butterfly-effect-type knock-on consequences, such that if they change events a few centuries back in time, it's likely that everyone now alive in the world will be replaced by someone different. Group B are therefore implacably opposed to group A, despite that each of them are motivated entirely altruistically.
I pick this example because it's been done more than once in genre, and with either group as the heroes.
--- Quote --- There are cultural ones, but not cultural ones based in rationality. Nobody should be so ingrained in a tradition so deeply they cannot bypass it. (Now, most people are, but I find irredeemable cultural differences to be an obnoxious plot device. It encourages closed mindedness.
--- End quote ---
And what if a character were to perceive your position on rationality and altruism as itself a culture-specific position of yours, and one you are being closed-minded about asserting must take precedence over other people's ? Could you buy such a character as a hero ?
--- Quote ---Shouldn't stories be about making things better, not stagnating and giving in to the same problems we deal with every day? Shouldn't they be a pathway to making people think past and through problems?
--- End quote ---
That's a different and knottier set of questions, but even granting for the sake of argument that it would be preferable for stories to have a positive impact in the world, I am not at all seeing how you go from your avowed perspectives in the above paragraphs to the answers you seem to be implying in this one. (Please do correct me if I misread you.)
--- Quote ---I can however forgive him for doing it because I understand the anger he felt.
--- End quote ---
I'd note that you're clearly operating from a different moral perspective to me, here. On the other hand, most of my characters operate from different moral perspectives than I do, too; it would be very boring to only be able to write sympathetic characters if you agreed with them, or unsympathetic characters if you didn't.
Dresdenus Prime:
Here's a question about writing a villian that doesn't add to this discussion, but rather than create a new topic I figure I would just post it in this one -
Is it plausible to write your first book of a series and introduce one of the primary series villains in Book 1? The end of the story would basically be a, "I'll get you next time Gadget!" moment. But I wasn't sure if this would be a bad choice - if I should concentrate on a lower level antagonist.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version