That alone becomes a matter of taste or style. A villain with a black soul is simple enough... Profound Narcisisstic Personality Disorder + Unrestricted Power, and you've got Joe Stalin or any of a number of other historical monsters for models.
A villain who's downright likable created a greater emotional impact when they do something that's shitty, but in character.
A weak-willed antagonist is another possibility. Londo Mollari from Babylon 5... You could really sympathize with him, get to like him even... so when he would choose selfishly despite his conscience, it had a greater impact on the viewer than "a bastard being a bastard" because he wasn't just screwing people over, he was throwing away his own potential.
---snip---
Londo's arc over the whole series is a wonderful example of carefully controlling audience sympathy across a range of different degrees of sympathetic, and all the more impressive considering how many extra-textual factors forced JMS to adapt his story into a shape that wasn't the original plan.
Agreed, consistency and coherency of character is everything; villains and heroes alike work better if they have flaws that fit with their virtues and virtues that fit with their flaws.
And if you have villains who are doing things just to be villains (and they know that they are the villains), then make sure they are right bastards, and ham it up. A good example would be Mr Croup & Mr Vandermar from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
I think I see what you mean. Correct me if I have missed it. For example, Artemis Entreri from R. A. Salvatore's novels never had real relationships in any meaningful way so he becomes self reliable. However, he beholds other's relationships as weakness to be exploited.
So you all would say the real issue with villains is not so much originality as there ability to affect the audience's emotions?
And then there's that creepy S.O.B. from "No Country For Old Men"...
I don't go and watch the hobbit to root against Smaug or the Goblins, so much as to root for the hero against these evil foes!
The Deposed King
And then there's that creepy S.O.B. from "No Country For Old Men"...
The Short Answer is that a Good Villain is in most respects the same as a Good Protagonist. Define what his narrative role is going to be: in your case it sounds like he's the Main Antagonist and a Foil to your MC. Then decide what kind of Villain you want him to be. ts a vast spectrum, but to me they are usually somewhere between Aberrant to Sympathetic: on one side are the villains that Neuro mentioned that have no interest in being the hero, while at the other end you have the villains that really have a valid point and legitimately believe they are doing the "right" thing. Right in the middle you have teh stereotype super-villain that is batshit crazy but thinks he is justified and so will monologue for an hour to convince others of that fact, allowing the hero to escape and foil the dastardly etc etc...
But the Short Answer is never all there is to it... 8)
Something I've noticed just now is that this list of Villain types totally ignores what is probably the most hated and reviled of all villains to ever grace a book or the main-screen. Shame on you guys!
What is this dastardly villain type you ask? I'll tell you.
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!
The Deposed King
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!
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.
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.
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.
Something that's always fun is to take a character like Aral Vorkosigan or Simon Illyan... and put them on the other side.
Something that's always fun is to take a character like Aral Vorkosigan or Simon Illyan... and put them on the other side.