Essence Of: Question Thread!

[Gnarl & Root]

What do you feel makes a good villain?
A good villain is one that evokes an argumentative response, or feeling of hatred from the viewer/reader.

How do you use villains in your story?
I use them to balance the story. Everyone in life sees someone as some sort of villain, not because they are evil, but because they get in the way of your own ideals. Being a villain is a readers perception of how someone influences your protagonists story in a negative way, and a good villain ruins or interrupts the bliss or goal of the story/protagonist.

If you write a villainous protagonist, how do you strike a balance between their actions and their palatability to your audience?
I like my villains to be selfish, this is because I think it's a key component in ones arsenal to be considered a villain. You look at any "evil" type character and they generally have one thing in common, they are selfish. Be it their reasoning, their goal, or their decision making. This doesn't mean to say being selfish makes you a villain, but I find it a strong way to help others take offense to your motives, as well as explain their own motives, cause who doesn't understand being selfish?

[Bard]

1. Well first, a villain, to be a villain, must provoke an emotional response, and this emotional response needs be more than merely that the character is antagonistic to the protagonist, the character must have at the core of his personality either some aspect that is either amoral or immoral.

2. I use Villains and antagonists in my stories to demonstrate the natural character of ‘mankind’ even when that might not always be humankind. Whether it is robots or AIs, or dragons, or what have you, both exist in my writings, because a lot of time people have conflicting goals and needs and wants and amoral and immoral people exist in the world. Even relatively good people have, as Yung put it “moments of immorality.”

3. Depending on what I need of that character I can do it one of two main ways, either I strive to make the reader understand why the character has become the villain, what rationalization has caused the person to come to that point (i.e. the internal rationalizations, the circumstances, the stresses, etc.), or I attempt to make the character one that one can at least suspend their disbelief over. A friend of mine calls it the Dark knight kind of villains, I either use someone like Harvey Dent, or I use the joker. The goal above all though is to make them interesting, entertaining, and to some degree believable.

[Flames of Hyperion]

A great set of questions this week - I really had to think how best to articulate my thoughts. I apologise in advance for rambling on without regard for the voices of your podcast guests. With thanks to Dawnmorrow for allowing me to bounce my ideas off her, and for adding a few well-considered points to these answers.

To answer these questions, I felt that I first had to define: what is a villain? The problem with this question is that unlike antagonists, which are defined by the plot, a villain is by definition 'evil'... but this 'evilness' is defined by the reader. A villain embodies negative attributes that we all possess within us - greed, violence, selfishness, egoism - but one person's egoism might be another person's pride, one person's selfishness might be another's right due. Depending on setting and background, and characters and their relationships, the villain of one story might for example be the anti-hero of another. One man's insurgent is another's freedom fighter, after all...

Some villains are motivated by impure and unsympathetic intention. Others can be defined by how far they are willing to go to achieve their aims, and by the methodologies they thus employ. But not all villains have both traits: a warmonger might be willing to compromise or act within the law to achieve his goal, while a templar might believe in justice but seek the death penalty for every transgression. Not all who have either are villains: a vengeant daughter may be talked down from her path, while a corrupt politician might make a deal with the mafia to limit deadly drugs on the streets.

I guess that my definition of a villain, then, is 1) that they wield enough power to affect the lives of others and 2) that if they should attain their heart's desire, then the world would become a worse place to live in for some or many of its inhabitants. ("Enough power"? "Worse place to live in"? "Some or many of its inhabitants"? I suppose at least I can come up with statistical definitions of these...)


1) What do you feel makes a great villain?

Again this is such a subjective question... it might involve contrary character attributes such as charisma or honour, thus giving the villain depth despite his 'evil' nature. The villain might have once been a hero or a victim, thus allowing readers to sympathise with his fall. Or the villain might be fully self-aware that he's doing evil for the sake of evil, and simply wants to watch the world burn - after all, black is perfectly possible even in a world of greys (but be careful not to make him/her/it a caricature!).

Let me assume that the villain is truly a villain, and that he has been treated with the same respect we afford our other characters in terms of personality, motivations, aspirations, and background. Let me assume that his plan makes sense from his perspective (my hero is wondering whether he is actually right after all), that he is competent enough to pull it off and a credible threat in his own right (my hero now fears that he's not going to be able to save the world in time), and that he's overcome a number of obstacles to get to this stage in the story (my hero may have had some successes, and other villains may have tried to hamper his opportunity, but he is consistent and determined).

What separates the best of villains from the great? In my opinion, it's their ability to manipulate the hero (and by extension the reader): to exploit his flaws, to turn him against himself. They're the polar opposite of the hero in many respects, but so nearly the same in many others - the villain is what our hero might become, or what he may have become if he took a single wrong turn in his past. And because of that, our villain knows exactly how and where they can hurt the hero the most.

This, to me, is a great villain.


2) How do you utilize villains in your stories?

The old adage is that the villain acts, while the hero reacts. I'm not fully convinced by this - at least, I prefer my heroes to display some initiative even when the villain is not around! - but I think that the first half at least holds true. Without my villains, I would not have an epic to tell. My antagonists catalyse conflict with my hero protagonists, but it's my villains who either drive these antagonists (i.e. as the underlying cause for their behaviour), or step in as the antagonists themselves in moments of climax.

Whenever I drop the name of one of my established villains in my stories, I want my reader to shiver and think, 'What is he going to do next? Is anybody safe?'. Hence I often use them to contrast the heroes in either methods or motives, for example to undo something that they've spent the past fifty pages working diligently towards. Or I show my villain challenging the heroes as he works towards his endgame, destroying their belief in themselves and slowly getting them to understand why he's acting as he is. Finally I like to show my villains succeed - by definition (since they're not working towards a better world for anybody but themselves!) this is often a major downer point in my plots.

One final technique that I'll mention here is what I shall now dub the 'Sliding Scale of Villainy'. For example, the Legion of Light arc of Nanashi's (Ingwe's) story begins with him as part of a volunteer expedition to retake Anebrilith, which is under siege by a group of necromancers called the Coven of Six. When the Coven is defeated or scattered, he finds himself now fighting their direct superior: the Death Knight, Maeril Thyrrian. Maeril's lieutenants include other villains, such as the wight-lord Kratos and the daemon prince Natosatael, but eventually they're defeated at the Battle of Nenaebreth... which propels Nanashi into conflict with Xem'zund himself. Even after Dawnbringers, when Xem'zund is defeated and the Death Lords diminished, Nanashi is aware that his battle hasn't ended and journeys forth once more of his own accord. This brings him back into war with his nemesis Natosatael and his old acquaintance Touma Kamikaji, with the shadows of things far greater and far worse lurking behind them. My point, I suppose, is that I never limit myself to 'a' villain. Let there be a sliding scale of villainy in which your villains have to prove themselves. Think about giving them depth with the chance to succeed against an even greater evil.


3) If you write a villainous protagonist, how do you strike a balance between their actions and their palatability to your audience?

First of all I always begin by trying to create a believable villain: a goal, a motivation, and a plan. I make them competent enough to be a credible threat to the world they're trying to change - they are villain protagonists after all, not comic relief. I round them out with some other elements of a 'great' villain above: history with mystery, sympathetic character traits with moments of 'weakness', charisma, anarchic tendencies, etc. I emphasise their belief that they are in the right (i.e. they're the hero of their own story, even if all they want to do is to see the world burn), and give them antagonists of their own (both villainous and heroic) to battle against. It's easier to do this if he's personally likeable - whether it be charisma, or gumption, or a sense of dark humour, or a hidden 'soul' factor, if I can make my readers kick themselves for loving such a scumbag - or relatable. I show him succeed, I show him fail, I give him development.

And then I write their actions strictly from their point of view. For example, a templar out to enact extreme justice at any cost might not notice that the child of his latest victim is in the crowd, so enamoured is he in the euphoria of having done something right. A mass murderer might list the sins of those he executes with every fall of his axe ("he who talks on his phone in public, she who spends a month's salary on her nails"). I suppose that this also makes it easier to depict them as interesting and likeable characters in their own right: our villain can better believe in his own charisma - and we as writers can better translate that to our readers - if he doesn't notice the people behind him staring!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I try to make sure that my villain protagonists don't venture into anti-hero territory without proper development. As a quick rule of thumb, if their motives are impure but sympathetic, and if they get their way the world will change for the better rather than for the worse, then I consider them an anti-hero rather than a true villain. There's nothing wrong with that, or with developing a villain in this way, but I have to be aware that I'm not writing a villainous protagonist any more, which has implications for my story structure as a whole.

[Karuka]

Here's a question (or three) for everyone:

1) Is there any interest in another episode of Essence Of?

2) If so, would you like to see an episode on technique, action, or mood?

3) Who would you like to see on as a guest?

[BlackAndBlueEyes]

Action, for sure.

[Storm Veritas]

Yes.
Any of these
Someone long at the site that isn't me

[SirArtemis]

Yes,

Any,

Flames. Maybe even Dirks. I want to hear his opinion on actual writing.

[orphans]

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.


EDIT:

Yes
Action specifically!
@Gnarl - I am much too elusive and skittish to be brought on as a guest for anything! Thus I vote for Raaaaaayleigh.

[Gnarl & Root]

Yes.
Action.
Orphans