Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "villains"

This is probably not universal for me, but I notice that in this particular story I've developed something of a priority on who holds the point of view in a given scene. Now that I've realized this fact, it's given me something to think about - and write about.

It goes something like...
Supporting characters > Minor antagonists > Main protagonist > Primary antagonist
A very short list - from the most likely to the least likely, usually in relation to who is present in the scene right now. Generally speaking, the second-rightmost present is the one whose eyes we're seeing it all through.

First, you've got all the minor folks, the support roles, and the victims of villainy, who hold on to the P.O.V. ball. Through their eyes and thoughts the reader gets to hear about their woes, about what's going on, and about these bad guys throwing their weight around. These early villains seem powerful and insurmountable.

Then the hero shows up. All mysterious and awesome, ready to aid the downtrodden and punish the wicked. And so we climb the ladder up by one rung, as the view switches to these minor petty lords and what have you: they're beginning to wonder, and doubt themselves, and fear. Through their eyes, the reader is introduced to the hero, and gets to see him perform, learn a little bit of him, but never truly to know him, maintaining his mystery.

Once these villains are dispatched, we drop back to the lower rung: the rescued civilians and the helpless peasants can now cheer on and wonder about this mystery fellow themselves. As he sticks around (if he does) and befriends these people, they get to learn more of him, pick up facets of his personality, hear his tragic backstory. Little by little, the main character is revealed to the reader.

Every once in a while we may get to see the story through the hero's eyes, when he's particuarly thoughtful or uncertain of himself, but it never really lasts... until the main antagonist enters the scene.

This guy is bad news. He's dark, and inscrutable, and intent on wrecking the lives of everybody for all time. He is unknown to us, and feared by us... and he evokes that same fear in everyone, even the hero. As these two titans clash, lesser people go to the sidelines, unable or unwilling to witness - and now we truly get to feel the hero's doubts, and struggles, and pains, through his eyes. We know him now, backstory and all, and we root for him - in essence, we are him, so of course we need to know what he thinks at all times.

When he wins, we will feel that too.

The thing I'm currently working on - Pirates of the Demure Sea - may be unclear at the outset on who the main villain even is: it has more than one character of equal status, power, and menace, each of whom might end up ascending as the ultimate threat once the other has been gotten rid of. But I'm going to follow the hierarchy outlined above, I think... planning to right now, at least. If I stick with it, it will provide you a clue.

It's very common nowadays to give your villain a bit more depth and motivation than simple lust for power. Something that even us, regular folks, might agree with - might even do the same he did, were we in his shoes. Or that's the idea.



I almost always end up hating it.

I get where you're coming from. You're trying to show that things aren't so black and white - that bad guys are human too, capable of love and compassion rather than just being a bunch of absolutely-evil punching-bags. And there's nothing wrong with wanting that. But this sort of a thing is so rarely thought fully through, and nearly always falls flat for three reasons.

First, they don't end up looking like any more three-dimensional human beings, at least for me. They just end up as absolute hypocritical myopic douchenuggets - even worse than how they would otherwise have been. Nothing else matters in the world except their pain. Again, nothing wrong with that as such - if it were ever addressed, and if it weren't so bloody common to the point of a cliché. How is it that none of these people ever stopped to think about what they were doing? How can every single one of them, even the otherwise smart diabolical masterminds, be so utterly narrow-sighted? It's just implausible.

Second, it so rarely has any real plot impact, apart from giving them a reason to do what they do. It all ends in a great big epic slugfest no matter what. They get beaten up and nobody learns anything. I feel like they could easily add a scene of some moral complexity and an epiphany where it actually hits them, or maybe the good guys get through them with a good talk, but, again, all too rare.



Thirdly... have you seen some of the people we have in the real world? Some of the politicians, the corporate executives, the serial killers? If we demand our fictional villains to be three-dimensional and on some level sympathetic, then does that not make them more sympathetic than the real people? Or do you suppose Jair Bolsonaro is torching down the Amazon because it killed his mother, and every time he sees a tree he feels a tug of immense grief in his chest, and requires some time to himself to cry it out?

Hell, maybe some of them do. But that raises another question, some food for thought: we really hate these people. We live in an age with an unprecedented and festering political rift, where anyone on the opposite side is vilified as an inhuman and unrepentant monster that deserves nothing but death. But what if they were just people, same as us, with their own feelings and secret motivations? Shouldn't that mean that we should stop hating them and instead try to build a better future together?

Or maybe they really are just a bunch of monsters, in which case, don't you think the fiction and stories should be allowed to portray such evil as well?

I don't know. Whichever one we choose, I think we can do way better than we do - be it in the real world, or with our entertainment.

Stop me if you've heard this one. A guy has some deep concerns about the world, the society, and the future. He (or she) attempts to make changes through the usual ways, only to be stonewalled. Nothing gets better. So he decides to save the world his own way.

And because he's the bad guy, this usually involves killing a whole lot of people.



So the good guys get together, begin their quest, face their challenges, grow and get better, then finally face the villain in his lair, listen to him prattle on about saving the world by killing off ninety percent of humanity, then cap his ass and go celebrate. The world is saved.

Only, no. The villain's original motive was perfectly valid. He had a good point with the whole thing, and the world is a real mess, and after his defeat, continues to be a real mess. You thought you made a change for the better... when really, you just returned things back to the status quo.

At best, the heroes decide to look into it themselves and maybe try and do better. But most of the time they just pretend it was a happy ending all around, and leave it at that.



This never sat right with me, and having seen Kingsman: The Secret Service today, the whole issue popped right back to the front of my brain. I figured I'd talk about it a little.

Why is it always like this? Why is it that these well-intentioned world-savers always go for the very craziest and most irrational solution they come up with? Couldn't they tone it down a notch? Couldn't they maybe compromise with the heroes and find a better way to solve things? Or maybe it's the heroes that come up with a fine solution, and the villains attempt to stop it? None of these are seen all too often at all - I can't think of a single example on top of my head. If you can, let me know.

In Kingsman, for instance, Valentine could have just used his usual pretenses to put up a chip inside the head of every corrupt politician and filthy-rich corporate dickbag... then instead of seeking to keep precisely these people alive, just blown up their heads. World saved at far less casualties! But no. Perhaps the folks in charge don't want to give us any ideas.

Or, more likely, it's just easier to write villains that way. Give them at least a pretense of sympathy and humanity. Just that it doesn't really work on me: it's unrealistic, full of holes, and just doesn't work. I'd rather have the usual greedy self-centered douchenoggets: you don't need to poke holes in their plans, at least not as many.

I guess I did the exact opposite with Starving Saint. You had a villain who claimed to have good intentions, claimed to make things better for everyone, and made some good points about why he was needed and how everything was a mess... but it was obvious that he was only in on it for his own benefit, and the heroes rejected the notion primarily because he was a self-centered dick. And then they managed to make a positive impact anyway.

But most of the time my villains are just plain pricks.