How to build a Villain

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by fantasy girl, Jan 3, 2010.

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  1. Cosmos

    Cosmos New Member

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    You're entitled to your opinion, but I happen to disagree. There is a moral difference in many villains or antagonist than their "good" counterpart. Certainly more antagonists are actually just people in competition with the protaganist (say two runners both trying to win a race for their country) but there can also be actual villians who are morally bankrupt and shouldn't be rose-colored "just on a different side". That said, it might be easier to write the villian if you do try to understand his motivations and goals even if you vehemently disagree with them.
     
  2. Norm

    Norm New Member

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    In a fictional story, I don't think it's fair to the reader to show the antagonist as "morally bankrupt" because morals for everyone are different, and it's hard to say which are correct or good and which are bad. Imagine that you are the reader and I'll ask you this: "Wouldn't you rather be able to observe and learn about this character and decide for yourself if he's really a bad guy?"

    I'm not saying that anyone hinted at this, but an obvious example would be not to describe how your villain killed ten kittens, stole all the food from a nursing home, and then burned down a church because that's not a very believable personality. Rather, you should take the time to explain the character's feelings and motivations and maybe he did kill a kitten, but WHY did he do it is what's important. It could be a perfectly justifiable action if you present the reader with a chance to make their own decisions about it.
     
  3. Cosmos

    Cosmos New Member

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    I can mention a dozen books that were insanely successful by not going into much detail about the villian's background and motivations. Personally I like multi-facted villians but I also know that there are villians out there that really don't have a lot of reason for doing what they do other than greed, lust and any number of vices that don't have much redeeming factors in them. I'm not saying make a total wackjob with zero definition, but going into too much detail or reasoning kind of kills the point of a villian--to be a villian.
     
  4. DvnMrtn

    DvnMrtn Active Member

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    Try thinking of the conflicts that are going to happen throughout your story. What is the villain going to do that makes them a villain to begin with? Then you have to try and put yourself in their shoes with the question 'what was it like?' If you can realistically see yourself and put yourself into the villains position chances are you've made a convincing villain. try jotting down notes about 'what it's like' it be the villain, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, background story, motives, etc. If you can make yourself believe it then you can make other people believe it
     
  5. arron89

    arron89 Banned

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    Personally, I find villains far more effective if I can't understand their motives or their morality. Case in point: Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight. He has no motive other than to destroy Batman and create chaos. Clearly he's a very disturbed person, but the audience is never given any insight into how or why he became that way, or why he feels compelled to destroy Batman, and it is because of this impenetrability that he succeeds as a villain.

    Obviously this wouldn't work for all antagonists, but this thread is about villains, who are just one small subset of antagonists in general, and I believe that in most cases, keeping the audience in th dark about the villain makes them more fearful about them. As the saying goes, knowledge is power, and making your reader vulnerable by restricting what they can know can be a very potent tool.
     
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  6. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    I thought his motives and how he became that way were made very clear.
     
  7. arron89

    arron89 Banned

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    In the movie he changes his story every time he tells it. The common element in each is the scarring on his face, but it's never concretely explained. As for his motives, like I said, he's obsessed with Batman and believes himself to be his counterpart, but it's not explained how or why he came to that conclusion. Elsewhere in the Batman canon he has too many origin stories to count, many which contradict the others' most important claims. Of all the Batman characters, he's definitely the most unknowable.
     
  8. B-Gas

    B-Gas New Member

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    With a character that's unknowable, it's important that we see them enough to know they're intentionally uknowable, rather than being undefined. With the joker, he's shown up hundreds of times throughout the Batman canon, and he prefers to keep his backstory "multiple choice" (his own words). We know that we will never know his motivation. He has proven it to us. He's scary because he comes from nowhere and no-one knows who he is, and yet he's right there, this historyless murderer. We wonder what his past really was, because we care about him.

    If we never see the guy, or we see only the effects of his actions, it's important that we know enough about them to see them as a threat- otherwise, we end up with another Dark Lord whose Terrible Might comes primarily in the form of Occasional Capitalization. In The Mountains Of Madness has one of the best of these- that is, unseen horrors, not Dark Lords- in the form of the Shoggoth. We never see the Great Old Ones, but we read their histories; we know about their terrible powers and great knowledge, their wondrous cities and beautiful culture. And we know why the Shoggoth exists- the Old Ones created it to be a pack mule, a workhorse, there simply to do the bidding of the Great Old Ones. We know that it rose up once before, and they lost millions of Old Ones in the fight to bring it down. The history continues on a little bit, talking about how the Great Old Ones wanted to leave but had forgotten how. We wonder what happened.

    Then, we hear the sound of thunder and the rush of air and see the great liquid beast charging toward us, consuming everything in its path, screaming a mimicry of the penguins that live inside its home. It's effective. If it hadn't been set up as an undefined threat that wiped out a civilization, we'd think it was just a big scary monster. Instead, it's an oh-god-what-is-that scary monster.

    TL;DR: Anyway. The point of this is, we need enough light to see just how dark it really is. An unknowable enemy needs to show up often enough that we know that it is unknowable; an unknowable, powerful foe that we don't see often needs to prove itself to us- or to others- before we can take it seriously.
     
  9. satch

    satch New Member

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    Hi,
    Thinking practically, you have to develop hatred about this character. I can understand, it is difficult to dislike the personality you create after thinking so much (may be). I am no experienced, but still..LOOK for the characters whom you donot like in real life and build on them. At least it gets easy. You are lucky, if you dont have at least one though. Smiles..
     

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