McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Bad Guys
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: The Deposed King on January 29, 2014, 01:36:24 AM ---Its the Beuaracratic Villain, whose main and only interest is following regulations and putting anyone who breaks them, villains sure, but most especially those vigilante heros who they view as a greater threat to society than out and out criminal rule breakers!
--- End quote ---
That kind of gets into conflating good/evil with law/chaos as a distinction, IMO. Heroes who are heroic because they buck the status quo and and antagonists who are villainous because they enforce it are a solid trope, but so are enemies that are monstrous and evil because they are attacking an established order of things that is good and right and heroes who are defined as heroic because they protect and reaffirm those things that are good and right. (Examples there being the Joker, or most of the outright antagonists in the DF, or the work of Stephen King and the large section of the horror genre influenced by King.)
There's really not all that much out there that does law/chaos without having some preconceptions about good and evil attached to either side. The original graphic novel of V for Vendetta, much more so than the film, and most of Judge Dredd in the comics; Dredd is interesting because the same writers do him as a consistent character who can be the antagonist to a young rebel who just wants to be free from the oppressive system in one story and saving the city from murderous enemies in the next one. (Don't watch the Stallone movie, don't read the DC or IDW comics; they are travesties. The Karl Urban movie gets the spirit of the character, and a lot of the original comics are collected; the character took a while to settle so if you want one good sampling of quintessential Dredd I recommend Case Files 5.)
LizW65:
For me, creating characters, villainous or otherwise, is a lot like method acting. What does the character want, and how does (s)he go about achieving it? What is (s)he trying to accomplish in each scene? What secrets is (s)he concealing, and from whom? What is the character doing when not actually "on stage"? Keeping these things in mind helps to inform the dialogue and characterization.
MacPhoenix:
I think between The DK, Neuro, and Liz a great villainess has been born.
The Deposed King:
--- Quote from: MacPhoenix on January 29, 2014, 05:47:51 PM ---I think between The DK, Neuro, and Liz a great villainess has been born. Get this triangle of dread: romance(imagined with the mc), bureaucracy, and views all those in the way of said romance as the monstrous evil that challenges the status quo.
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Best of luck, MacPhoenix.
The Deposed King
OZ:
--- Quote ---There's really not all that much out there that does law/chaos without having some preconceptions about good and evil attached to either side.
--- End quote ---
I think some of the best law/chaos stories out there are Modesitt's Recluce novels. The first handful of stories (most stand alone or are two parts although they all take place in the same world) seem to paint law as good and chaos as evil. He then tells several stories from characters that are involved with chaos that are certainly not evil. He even overlaps a few stories where you see how the protagonist of an earlier story looks from the other side. I don't like everything that Modesitt does but I really liked the contrasting viewpoints in different stories.
In Jonathan L Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, one of the minor villains is Arthur Trubshaw. He was a clerk at a bank whose life of "licentious proceduralism" was ended when he was shot while demanding that robbers give him a receipt for the money they were stealing. He now resides in Hell and is in charge of admissions. He requires people to fill out reams of paperwork and if they make even the slightest error, he rejects their paperwork and makes them fill it out again. A bureaucratic villain indeed.
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