My Rant About Villains

Prepare your imaginary selves for some ranting.

Okay, so I know I said I was going to write about plot, but that will just have to wait. Besides, I said I would write about it when I felt like it. Your first mistake was assuming I would feel like it.

So. Villains. We love them, we hate them, we love to hate them, we hate to love them, and any combination thereof. Imagine your favorite classic Disney villain, just so that we're all on the same page. Personally, I'm torn between Scar, Gaston, and Prince John. If you don't know who these characters are, you need to spend some time refreshing your Disney memory.

Now, the reason I'm using Disney villains is because they're all very much alike and all very much how people typically think of villains. They all have some nefarious scheme in mind that will greatly benefit them while making everyone else completely miserable. They feel that they deserve it and that everyone else can just suck it up because they're lame anyway. Scar feels that he should have been the Lion King (pun alert!) instead of Mufasa, Gaston feels that he should be the one to marry Belle, and Prince John feels that he should be king (also a lion, coincidentally) instead of King Richard. Why? Well, Scar is smarter than Mufasa, Belle is the most beautiful girl in town and therefore the only one worthy of Gaston, and King Richard is off doing the whole Crusade thing and while we're on the subject everyone always liked him better anyway so Prince John deserves at least a little recognition thank you very much.

But my main question is this: do villains always think that they're evil? Maleficent certainly does, since she repeatedly references her own evilness. But now think of a person (a real person, not a Disney character) who you would consider to be a villain. For my example, I'm going to use this really annoying kid that I knew through middle school and high school who liked to spend most of his time antagonizing me. Did he realize just how much he annoyed me? Difficult to say. I told him, but he might not have believed me. Did he genuinely believe that what he was doing was wrong? Probably not. It's not like he was killing kittens or something to that effect. Even though I considered him evil incarnate, did he? Of course not. People don't think of themselves as evil. They may do things that they know are wrong, but they will find some reason to justify their doing it.

The thing that drives me crazy about so much fantasy is that the villain is a stock character. Villains are incredibly important. If you want to write a realistic character for your villain, you need to ignore the stereotype. Villains are humans too. Or lions, if you're dealing with Scar and Prince John. They need to have human (or lion) motivation. When you have a random guy going around with a laser shooting everyone and laughing about how evil he is, he's not very believable. The giant robot who goes around crushing cars and tearing down buildings and shoots laser beams out of his eyes may be badass and over 9,000, but he's not really that interesting. And when all the hero has to do is get in that one perfect shot to the occipital lobe or hit the kill switch before the bad guy gets them, you're kind of hurting on plot.

In my writing, I don't really have any characters I consider villains. Now, that's not necessarily how everyone should write (although I know you all want to be just like me). But for me, the struggle is more interesting when it's between two people instead of between a person and a cardboard cutout. Can you have a character who is a villain without being a cardboard cutout? Of course. But after all the movies and comic books and video games, it sure is difficult.