The Villains

 One of the struggles I have in writing fiction is writing a great bad guy. I can scheme up all sorts of examples of fantastic evil shenanigans for a villain to do. There are plenty of tropes to draw from. The antagonist could work to replace the current royal person in order to replace them directly or via a puppet they can control. They could be carrying out a ruthless agenda and the hero or their family gets caught in collateral damage. As some casual side effect of the ambitions of the sociopathic character a great many souls can come to one bad end or another. 

All of the pieces of getting them into a story are in my head. The problem for me is fleshing that character out. I think I enjoy ancient and incomprehensible beings from beyond space and time because you don't have to explain how they interact negatively with the hero and their world. The Great Old Ones just aren't good for reality and the people who live in it. They don't have to concentrate on how they are wrecking that plucky investigator's life. They just do it because the stars are aligned, some fool is reading out the magic words again, the person guarding the gate to keep them asleep got bored and went to Vegas, or it it Thursday. 

Meanwhile, not even baddie can be based on cosmic horror or dripping with demonic evil. I think for a story to be satisfying the villain needs depth, motivation, and flawed but effect methodology. I think it helps if they have some grounding in a relatable emotion like revenge that goes to an unreasonable extent. 

You grow up in a horrible area, poor, and abused watching the rich take advantage of everyone around you and that motivates you to consolidate your personal power to gain wealth and influence enough to create a more just world. Along the way you find out that brutality is effective if regrettably necessary. Pretty soon you are slow rolling people into vats of acid feet first over all to small provocations, but you have come to believe that this prevents greater evils. Cool. Bad guy. 

I also don't love redeeming the villains or making them too relatable. I think this ends up dumbing down the hero and making them less interesting. The purpose of a rival is to have someone who a hero disagrees with but still has respect for and isn't trying to directly oppose. Harry Dresden has Donald Morgan. Harry Potter has Draco Malfoy... through most of the books. The rival is in opposition to the hero but sometimes this is by circumstances beyond their control. The rival gets a clever arc and eventually ends up as a reluctant but valuable ally of the hero. Professor Snape would be a rival if he hadn't be so much more powerful than Harry all along. 

The Harry Potter series would have been terrible if it ended with Voldemort realizing he had done all this torture, racism, attempted genocide, and murder for the wrong reasons. Headmaster Riddle would have been a totally unacceptable result of those books. Comic books and fantasy novels have a habit of there being an unstoppable villain for a long arc. When the heroes triumph and discover there is a bigger baddie aforementioned villain suddenly becomes a reluctant ally. Think Magnus in Chronotrigger as a good video game example. 

Then again if I make my villain too terrible and unrelatable to ever be redeemed is the story still going to be enjoyable? It has gotten pretty exhausting and inexcusable for Batman not to have found a permanent solution to Joker. Even if we want to protect Batman's character there have been ample opportunities where Batman could have not gone out of his way to save Joker. This is why I like the Murphyverse of Batman comics better. We know Joker's alter ego isn't a completely rotten scoundrel even though he has some messed up behavior. Batman has a reason to hold out some grudging respect for him and has a reason to what to cure him... you know.... just go read all of the Sean Murphy Batman stuff. It is the cream of the Batman crop. 

I'd love to make this post longer, but all this thinking about characters has inspired me to want to work on my baddies a bit. I want to connect some dots in some more intriguing ways. Honestly, I am toying with putting up some short stories as blog posts rather than this endless exposition.