Furry Writers' Guild Forum

How do you make a villain more plausible? Advice needed, please?

General Writing Discussion
#1

To start off with the feel I’m going for in this story i’m creating is a drama of the entertainment variety. It’s a fantasy steam punk world in which two factions are at war but the portion of the tale I’m focusing on is just between the antagonist, and the protagonist. The war is just a backdrop, nothing more. The Antagonist is basically cold, conniving, calculating, manipulative, and a rather hefty portion of intellectual insanity. She doesn’t care who she has to step over or what she has to destroy in order to get what she wants. And what she wants is… complicated. It’s not the object that she cares about but the journey to obtain whatever object or objective that happens to be striking her fancy at the time.

Unfortuantely the hero kind of stopped one of her attempts in seeking what has her interest because it would have killed or critically injured hundreds of people, and now she’s singled him out and seeks to utterly destroy him for simply doing his job. He has sullied her personal pride and now feels that he has to pay for it with his life.

My problem essentially boils down to this. Originally when I created her I intended for her to be one of those villains that everyone just loved to hate. However in doing so I made her so irredeemable a character that she became a very over the top and completely unrealistic. The story essentially collapsed at this point as she suddenly became unbeatable. However upon trimming it down to make her more believable I inadvertently turned her into a very two dimensional character. What you see of her is what you get and there’s nothing overly special about her at all beyond these qualities.

The hero is a detective/cop. He cares about others but is also very rigid in his belief of doing things the right way. Things have to be done in an accordance with the law and he doesn’t like budging on that issue if he can help it. add the fact that he’s still fairly new to his status as a Detective and is still learning the field so he has quite a bit of inexperience and naivete.

His first case he was brought on to observe a few murder cases. Though given the world is a steam-punkish world they don’t have the level of forensics we do in today’s modern world. So the murders were simply logged as muggings gone bad and left to that. However upon digging further into the four who were murdered, the hero learns that there may be more to this plot as all the characters involved all have something in common which leads him to a project they had all been working on. As a result the case is blown wide open and the research along with the items being researched are quickly placed under lock and key. The main villainous takes extreme exception to this and discovers that it was the hero of this story who is to blame. So now she not only seeks to claim that research from a safely guarded impound safe in the middle of a police force compound, but also intends to kill the one that took it from her in the process. And that’s the story thus far.

#2

The things about villains is that for them to be good, they must in their mind be the hero. Those are the most memorable villains. See Andrew Ryan, from Bioshock, for a great example. Nobody thinks, “I’m a pure evil sonofabitch, but who cares?” Another example for a good villain would be Jack Bauer from 24, if he were portrayed in that way. We can see why he does the things he does, even if they’re unethical or immoral.

You can have a pure evil style of villain and people won’t hate you. It’s just that the reader won’t related to them, and consequently it’ll be much less easy for you to engulf them in the story.

That’s just my cent.

#3

I think that all the time, actually.

As far as the villain thing goes, well, I try to write characters as neither wholly good nor wholly evil. I also never tag any particular character as a “villain,” but then, my characters’ conflicts tend to be internal, so that probably doesn’t help you much. ^.^;

My humble suggestion would be that you give her some qualities with which the reader may sympathize. That might help.

#4

I’m with Friday, but I will add that you can do a purely evil/heartless villain and still have that villain be sympathetic. Oddly enough, this was demonstrated pretty well in the recent movie Dredd. Basically, the villain there was this former prostitute named Mama, someone who grew up in the bad part of town and had to do what she could to get by. In her case, I guess, she decided at some point that since the world was garbage (and in that setting it totally was), the only real way to live a pleasant life was to get so nasty and brutal that no one would ever again try to mess with you. So she’s obviously irredeemable, but at the same time you understand where she’s coming from and can sympathize to some extent.
It’s easy to screw that up by falling into cliches, of course, but as long as the villain is an interesting character or is portrayed in an interesting and novel way it can work out.

So I think in general the trick is just to make sure your villain has a clear and logical motivation for doing bad things. Basically, treat your readers like adults who’ve met a lot of other people and hence have an intuitive understanding of complex personalities.

#5

I’m terrible at this. Seriously. I feel like I too often spoon-feed my readers conclusions. T.T

#6

Um, I realize that what I’m about to suggest is going to probably require a lot of re-writing but…

What if you flip the script? What if it is the detective/“hero” that is the cold, calculating heartless one, who doesn’t care who he hurts so long as he gets his fur? (Sherlock Holmes, after all, was quite the SOB…) What if the “villain” is actually a good person who happens to be in favor of a cause that is inconvenient?

If you’re living in an ultra-repressive Victorian England, is Fu Manchu really a bad guy? I’m thinking of some of Michael Morecock’s proto-steampunk works, for instance, where you have an almost stereotypical “Asian” villain, but to a modern reader, his cause seems more just.

Just a thought…

#7

This may get censored but there’s this book called Bullies, Bitches, and Bastards and it would be of an enormous help to you. They steer you away from your archtypal Snidely Whiplash and give you more Lucifer’s from Paradise Lost. As a matter of fact, It’s called Sympathy for the Devil when you make your reader take an active interest in your villian beyond their trying to blow up the world.

When I roleplayed, I had a villainous wolf by the name of Necrosis. He fought, tortured, killed, and black-mailed the others without being a pure psychopath who doesn’t have a mind. Necro had been abused as a pup, abandoned, and had a rough life growing up and it colored his actions and thoughts. He wasn’t evil because he just set out to do the opposite of good; no, he was a villian because his wants, needs and desires were contrary to everyone else’s and the means he was willing to use were adverse to theirs. But, he also had a mate and pups and that brought out a side no one expected. The most evil people in history tended to have families and lovers. Give the reader a glimpse into that too.

Make your villian seem real and have a realistic motive behind their delinquencies and you’ll have the reader hooked.

#8

I had the exact opposite experience with that book.
I’m struggling to finish it because a lot of the information they present is repeated over and over again throughout the book to fill page space, and the writing is uninteresting and rather poorly presented. You can find a lot of the same information in pretty much any book on characters.

As for my two cents on making a villain plausible, just remember that a good villain never believes what he is doing is wrong. They should have as much history, if not more, than your main character, if you want them to be sympathetic enough for the reader to relate to.

#9

I saw this article on iO9 today, and it made me think of this thread:

It’s a list of ways to make people root for your amoral protagonist, but since villains are the protagonists of their own story, I think these strategies could be flipped around and used to make compellingly complex villains as well.

#10

There are several different types of villains, and all of them have their place. Let’s take a look at an example and see what is good and what is bad about him.

First off, since your character is a detective, let’s look at the Joker. Yes, the Batman nemesis. He is pure and utter evil, in any of his incarnations. There is nothing redeemable about him because he refuses to consider redemption as an option, and finds redemption morally repugnant. And yet, he has some aspects of a magnificent bastard as well. He’s not particularly intelligent, but he is very crafty and cunning. He has an excellent grasp of humanity, even as he has completely rejected it. He knows how humans think, how they work, and uses this to his advantage both in offense and in defense.

One of the most compelling detective type stories is the one where the villain is so batshit crazy, that there is no way to predict his movements until the Hero makes a concerted effort to think like the villain… and that’s when the morality lines can start to blur. And now the Hero can see the villain’s perspective, and possibly even tempted by it. This, by definition, can make even a complete monster at least somewhat sympathetic, because you are finally seeing the motivations behind the monstrosity.

So now you have one plot, where you have to stop the villain because otherwise horrors will ensue. Then you have the morality problem, once the Hero finally figures out how the villain thinks, he will be tempted to use those same tactics. Rationalizing that it is being used for good. Realizing that it is a slippery slope. Can one employ the knowledge without employing the techniques? That will be the challenge the Hero has to face. Then, of course, the villain can hit him with the mirror, and it will be up to the hero to decide how much alike or different they actually are.

Above all, in my personal opinion, a villain should be villainous. He should not be a sympathetic character you are secretly rooting for, he should be someone who must be stopped. And that’s where you can get into the -real- mind-screw for the reader. If you can get the reader so invested in wanting to stop this guy, you can get the reader to understand the moral juxtaposition of ‘how far should I got to stop him’ and ‘is ‘at any costs’ a statement which should ever be used’.

Think Hannibal Lecter. He was a completely irredeemable monster. Yet he was a completely believable villain. He was someone who simply had to be stopped. And you had to go further down the rabbit hole than was comfortable in order to figure out how. He made you question your preconceptions of humanity and morality.

And when you can get the reader to shiver at this discovery… then you’ve got a book worth publishing!

#11

So Clyde, as much as I agree with a lot of what you said, I really disagree that a morally redeemable villain isn’t a good one. Andrew Ryan, from Bioshock, it someone whose views we totally understand from his point of view; all of his actions make sense not just by subjective but by objective standards. He’s considered one of the best villains in any video game. No one secretly rooted for him, they just realized that he couldn’t see why his views were wrong; it was impossible. And as such, you had to stop him, even though a lot of people would have done the same in his position.

Vaas, from Farcry 3, is another video game with a strong villain, and he’s much more like what you’ve described.

Both are powerful villains. Both work. They’re two different kinds. Personally, I hated Vaas because of how flat he was, but he was a villain that made me shudder.

#12

I think you may have misinterpreted my statement. Permit me to clarify.

I didn’t say that a morally redeemable villian isn’t a good one, I said that a villain needs to be villainous and needs to be something that has to be stopped. By that statement, your example of Andrew Ryan still fits the litmus test. I said that he should not be a sympathetic character which you are secretly rooting for. That would be more along the lines of ‘oh, but he’s not really a villain, he’s really just misunderstood’.

There should be no ‘misunderstanding’ about your villain. He needs to be villainous. He might be able to be villainous for the ‘right reasons’, he might even acknowledge that he is a monster (The Operative from the movie Serenity being a prime example of something like this), it might be someone you can completely understand. The tropes to avoid, in my opinion, are things like Draco in Leather Pants (Sephiroth…) where you start wondering why your hero is persecuting him… unless you want to pull a Fiddler On The Roof and have the ‘villain’ actually be your hero, while following the villainous ‘hero’ in his relentless pursuit. But even there, you have a properly villainous figure who is persecuting the victim far beyond what the crime warrants.

Vaas, from Farcry 3, is another video game with a strong villain, and he's much more like what you've described.

Both are powerful villains. Both work. They’re two different kinds. Personally, I hated Vaas because of how flat he was, but he was a villain that made me shudder.

True, the difficulty is keeping the character from being ‘flat’ or two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. But it is that shudder that, I think, really makes a villain.

After all, the hero wandering around sniffing flowers and petting bunnies is not a good novel. For a Hero to have a story… he needs to have an antagonist. And to truly show his mettle, he needs a properly villainous villain who is capable of pushing him to exceed even his own expectations. Perhaps not completely irredeemable, but in my experience… the weaker the villain, the weaker the hero.

#13

Okay! All that makes sense. I can agree.

#14

I think the best villains are tragic in nature. For them to do what they do, hurt people without feeling any empathy, means there’s something empty inside them. They’ve rejected or are incapable of feeling love and fellowship with others, and that should evoke sorrow.

#15

There are many keys to making believable villains. Cast them in a light of a tragic hero. Give hints of the character’s story as you encounter them or hear of their exploits through others. Have the character portray some kind of character flaw that may have lead them astray. Build on that pain and emphasize the flaw until they choose to face it, but upon facing it they take a turn that makes you dread their decision instead of cheer for their triumph.

If a character is established as a terrible person from the start then show something that makes them appear to possess some form of morality. Make them justify their actions as an attempt to change the world for the better or to protect others, to fulfill a desire someone they trust held. Always keep that carrot dangled in front of the audience to make them wonder more about the character and give enough to make you want to invest as much in them as the protagonist (if the protagonist isn’t a bad guy already, which makes this even more important).

If a character is depraved of any sense of morality have them do something that makes the stomach turn or heart sink. Think of those things that fills you with shock and dread, those boundaries that there is no justification in crossing and cross them. As much as destroying a whole village contribute to a high body count it’s the act of seeing what has happened to the people that can leave you shocked. Finding a mother cradling her child, both impaled upon a spear can illicit a strong response. If they’re both alive with the spear piercing their bodies and the mother is slowly rocking the child singing a weak song while they both lay dying you feel a lump in your throat. Watching the terrors of this villain’s passing can be as important as establishing them.