I need to get a discussion going about villains, because I'm having trouble developing one in my current story. If we can just talk generally about villains I might get my subconscious into action and produce the goods. Right now there is a discussion on Amazon about this and someone there whinged w...
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Villains must have a reason to be angry, they must feel they are right. On the other hand they could simply enjoy the terror they impose on others.
The most interesting viillian to me was Fletcher from whiplash.
He can be nice to your kid one minute and destroy your life the next.
He is as sociopathic as he is talented.
Man, if I could write a villain like that....
The simple thing is this: Your antagonist is somebody who has goals that oppose the protagonist. They are the character your audience roots against. In MOST stories they're a villain - that is, the pr...
Expand commentThe simple thing is this: Your antagonist is somebody who has goals that oppose the protagonist. They are the character your audience roots against. In MOST stories they're a villain - that is, the protagonist is "good" and the antagonist "evil," possibly with some shading. They don't have to be. Where you should start is "What is your villain's goal and how does it intercept your protagonist's goal." Your villain wants something. Simplistically, this could be power or wealth. It could be attention (most serial killers). In some stories the GOAL of the villain may be good, but the way they get there is bad. (We'll fix global warming by killing a ton of people, for example). Some protagonist/antagonist pairs even have the SAME goal - Professor X and Magneto being a classic example of this. So one approach is to give the villain a goal with which people sympathize, such as "Protect my people." Twist that a little bit and you get Magneto - "Protect mutants at all costs". Twist it even further...and you get Adolf Hitler actively protecting "his people" through genocide.
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One of my most favorite villains is Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) from Bridge on the River Kwai and I think it's because he saw himself as anything but a villain. From his perspective, Colonel Nicho...
Expand commentOne of my most favorite villains is Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) from Bridge on the River Kwai and I think it's because he saw himself as anything but a villain. From his perspective, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) was the villain.
I remember Tolstoy saying something like the best stories aren't good versus evil but good versus good.
@Erik I think you are exactly right. Even down to the observations about Hitler.
This brings a question in my mind; It seems like the what you're getting at is a lack of introspection on the part of th...
Expand comment@Erik I think you are exactly right. Even down to the observations about Hitler.
This brings a question in my mind; It seems like the what you're getting at is a lack of introspection on the part of the villain about what they are doing. Or at the very least, just not caring about the harm.
I'm sure Hitler knew he was harming six million Jews and 22 million Russians. I don't think he was ignorant of that. But, he felt there was some perverse "greater good" that he was in provenance of (which you mention) that made those facts "less important" in his mind than what he was doing. I don't think this was "ignorance" - I think it was calculated and purposeful.
Movie villains these days don't seem to have the weight of that kind of horribleness. The example I gave was of Fletcher in Whiplash - he wouldn't even be a fly in Hitler's fruit salad compared to Hitler himself.