McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Writing villains
Dresdenus Prime:
Interesting you posted this question, I just read an article on www.ign.com recently about supervillians in movies. The article goes into some detail about what makes them great, and while it mainly deals with the cinematic supervillian, I think there is some good stuff there that is helpful in the literary villian as well!
Here's the link to the page:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/12/the-rise-of-the-supervillain
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on August 15, 2012, 01:14:09 PM ---And remember, villains don't think of themselves as villains. As far as they're concerned, they're the heroes of their own stories, the good guys, doing battle against your evil, oppressive hero. ;)
--- End quote ---
Mostly, yes.
I've known three people in real life who were consciously doing "evil be thou my good" as an avowed philosophy and deriving pleasure directly from messing up other people's lives, and done enough helping clean up the resultant messes to have a bit of a hot button on the notion that everyone is the hero of our own story. (As well as the feeling that for a goodly chunk of my own life I'm much more a spear-carrier in the story, and the Thing Which I Should Be Working On is among other things an experiment with that.)
With regard to writing villains, though, maybe it's nearing forty, but I am kind of getting tired of villains who do something despicable as a cheap and simple way of polarising reader sympathies; that story's been done and done and done. I'm much more drawn at this point to conflicts where both sides are as close to equally sympathetic as I can make them. (This is hard.)
o_O:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on August 15, 2012, 03:35:36 PM ---With regard to writing villains, though, maybe it's nearing forty, but I am kind of getting tired of villains who do something despicable as a cheap and simple way of polarising reader sympathies; that story's been done and done and done. I'm much more drawn at this point to conflicts where both sides are as close to equally sympathetic as I can make them. (This is hard.)
--- End quote ---
Would it be equally as hard to be equally sympathetic (or possibly harder yet) if you hadn't had that spear-carrier feeling?
(I'm working on the idea that people with a strong sense of agency IRL would not be equally disposed to be sympathetic to both sides in fiction as those with a sense of being in the back of the phalanx. At this juncture I don't have a clear sense of which way that inequality would tilt).
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: o_O on August 15, 2012, 04:48:23 PM ---Would it be equally as hard to be equally sympathetic (or possibly harder yet) if you hadn't had that spear-carrier feeling?
--- End quote ---
Hard to tell.
--- Quote ---(I'm working on the idea that people with a strong sense of agency IRL would not be equally disposed to be sympathetic to both sides in fiction as those with a sense of being in the back of the phalanx. At this juncture I don't have a clear sense of which way that inequality would tilt).
--- End quote ---
I think an awful lot of people have stronger senses of agency than their lives actually support, and i am a long way from comfortable with many of the consequences of this.
Aminar:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on August 15, 2012, 03:35:36 PM ---Mostly, yes.
I've known three people in real life who were consciously doing "evil be thou my good" as an avowed philosophy and deriving pleasure directly from messing up other people's lives, and done enough helping clean up the resultant messes to have a bit of a hot button on the notion that everyone is the hero of our own story. (As well as the feeling that for a goodly chunk of my own life I'm much more a spear-carrier in the story, and the Thing Which I Should Be Working On is among other things an experiment with that.)
With regard to writing villains, though, maybe it's nearing forty, but I am kind of getting tired of villains who do something despicable as a cheap and simple way of polarising reader sympathies; that story's been done and done and done. I'm much more drawn at this point to conflicts where both sides are as close to equally sympathetic as I can make them. (This is hard.)
--- End quote ---
I'm in a way just the opposite. I'm tired of stories that are so realistic I can't derive joy from reading them. I don't read to feel reality, I live in it. I deal with some of the worst of it(via my job) every day. Why would I want my free time devoted to that? At the same time I try to mix the two. I have evil people. I have good people. I have evil people doing good and good people doing evil. A story can and should have both. Otherwise you end up with either Game of Thrones level depressing or cartoon level cliche villainy.
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