The Psychology of Evil: Comparing notes on what makes a good antagonist

What drives a villain is either insanity, hatred, or compassion. You might be looking at me strange on that last part, but the villain of a story could feel like he's helping the world or expressing his love to whatever the subject is.

Spoiler

Ozy from Watchmen is an example of someone who believed he was saving the world by killing I think a million people

I think for a character to be classified as evil he has to know that what he's doing is wrong, but just doesn't care. If he can't tell the difference then he's insane, but not evil.

 

This sounds kind of like Dana Scully from The X-Files. She did seem like a sort of antagonist to Mulder.

 

You mean psychopaths?

 

Well, in that context I was actually speaking of fictional stories and our perceptions of how villains, evil and antagonists should be rather than the actual real thing. I think what makes the clichéd storybook villain into a drag rather than an excitement is that we tend to see things in black and white. To make a person see something as bad, we use the visual aspects of a person or that object. The good guy is often seen as the handsome do-gooder, while the evil guy is ugly and shrouded in blackness and despair. We even see this in regular society with a high emphasis being placed on ones looks in regards to their popularity.

In the real world, nobody would dare cut their mustache like Hitler's or wear the swastika unless they were part of his belief system. These otherwise harmless "looks" have become synonymous with evil. What would happen if Hitler had been an extraordinarily attractive man who didn't have the crazy hairstyle and mustache? What if he looked exactly like everyone else? What if he only flew the German flag and not the swastika? Would we have to change our perception of what good and evil looked like in people? Would the world have wanted to completely eradicate Germany the country and not just the Nazi party?

Clichés and stereotypes are often dangerous in the real world, which is what makes psychopaths/sociopaths such a danger. They can look like us, talk like us, and act like a good person. We don't want to believe anyone when we are told that they are evil, because our perception of them is that of the stereotypical good guy. That in itself can help to make a well-rounded villain. What makes a villain scary is that they are NOT crazy. If they are, we can distance ourselves from them. But if we can relate to that villain it makes us question ourselves and our own beliefs - whether we are capable of evil.

Regardless of what evils he committed against the Jews and many others, Hitler did many good things for his country too. Yet because of the bad things, we want to make him into this entity of evil who eats babies and craps lightning and fire. If we acknowledge what good he did, then it makes US feel as if we are capable of doing what evil HE did.

 

I don't believe in good and evil. A good antagonist is someone at least as capable as the protagonist, with conflicting objectives and willing to do something about them.

 

He had stylish hair and a handsome moustache for the time in which he lived.

And it makes it feel like we are in part justifying him.

 

Exactly!

 

Did the Aztecs really use hot pokers? I don't think there's any big difference between, on the one hand, chanting and ceremonial knives, and, on the other, prayers and gas chambers.

American-style executions are highly ceremonial. They follow a certain procedure that is meant to appease both law and an abstract sense of justice, and to cleanse the victims of the hatred and sorrow which plagues them. The prisoner is taken from their cell; they are walked along a certain path; on this path, the prisoner is given the chance to partially redeem himself by facing his death with courage, but if he shows fear and resists, his shame becomes even greater; the prisoner is constrained; a prayer is said to aid the prisoner's soul in the afterlife; in some places, the victims or their families are allowed to witness the execution firsthand, to cleanse themselves of the feelings the original crime caused in them.

 

The sequence of events you list here are pretty accurate, but that is not the philosophy behind them.

The execution procedure is rigorously set down to protect the rights and dignity of the condemned as much as possible under the circumstances. Any resistance the condemned puts up is not made public, although it is always possible that someone will leak information. Approved execution methods must minimize pain and suffering, and every measure is taken to preserve dignity and to allow the condemned to seek spiritual solace, and to offer final thoughts. The execution methods are activated by three or more persons, with only one of those persons (and no one knows which one) actually causing the lethal event. The observers are witnesses that the execution is conpleted humanely, and they are required to treat the event with solemnity.

 

Just a point of historical note:

Hitler's mustache is distinctly "nazi" in modern perceptions of people who weren't around during the era, but it was actually a quite popular fashion statement in the early years of the 20th century, called the "box" mustache and popularized in film by the famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, in the silent film era predating World War II (google image search him and you'll see what I mean).

Are you implying that we "aren't" capable of doing the evil Hitler did?

Human nature is human nature. Genocide is taking place right now in parts of Africa and in some of the former Soviet republics. The West isn't without stains on its history as well.

The human psyche is a balancing act of right and wrong and winning or losing the balancing act is what makes us good of evil. Even the best of us have their "bad" days.

 

Not at all. But we like to believe that we aren't capable, or would never do something like that. Even children are able to kill someone. What makes the difference is whether they understand the consequences, and whether they actually give a damn about it.

 

Think about this. If you look at it from the reader's pov, the antag is the one that pisses off the reader most, whether or not the author intended it. Some readers - same in movies - want the antag to win.

Interesting. I wonder how many would reconsider murder if the consequence was simply an "eye for an eye."

 

Hitler like every other human being was an incredibly complex personality. He was considered a sex symbol, he suffered horrific abuse as a child. Was ridiculously kind to animals to the point of vegetrianism, he never touched drink or drugs - the story about what happened to his Jack Russell is heartbreaking. He was a decorated war hero, suffered horrific injury (hence the crude song) in rescuing a fellow officer, he was recommended for the Iron Cross by a Jewish Officer. He lived through terrible poverty. Don't put his name on it and write his story upto the beginning of WW2 and I am willing to bet the reader will shed tears for him. It is an incredible story. This in no manner diminishes the evil he then went on to commit. But he has a story, one that can teach us.

I have a similar character in my book. Her horrific abuse as a child, and subsequent life give her a weird view on the world - that allows her to work her way into her brother's affections and him to turn a blind eye to her evil. Doesn't change the fact she is a nasty piece of work and is out to destroy him but the reader will find some sympathy and feel pain on her behalf.

There was that was it a French or Dutch TV show - reality TV where they gave people a button that could electrocute someone. All bar three of them if it had been real would have contributed to a man's death in the name of competition as they knew it was a pilot and all they would be paid was £40. These were normal everyday people the three that didn't had all suffered trauma or had someone close to them suffer (one was a descendant of a holocaust victim). Those that hadn't didn't stand up to be counted. The show was based on a similar famous psychology experiment.

 

Though, let us never forget that someone with a bland backstory who turns to evil out of boredom will connect with readers still if his boring everyday life is similar enough to theirs and presented in just the same sympathetic way to explain it. Not everyone has a horrific past, but anyone could be evil.

 

I may be wrong here, but the problem I see with that is that you cannot "turn to evil" out of boredom. You can only be a jackass trying to get attention.

In order to become truly evil, there must be some underlying passion or drive that turns one into a man possessed.

 

Some people are born mean and just stay that way. Some are made mean and evil, and some choose to become that way. I don't know why that is, but it is.

 

Oh, it must have been based on the Milgram experiment. The outcome of the experiment was quite "shocking." (appropriate choice of words, huh?) 65% of the subjects didn't stop giving shocks even though they thought it could possibly kill the person being subjected to the shocks. The researchers concluded that people have an innate behaviour to do as told. I think, in the case of that experiment, people were probably confident that nothing would happen to the subjects, trusting the researchers and the experiment. The researchers made the link to war-criminals; they are just "obeying the rules," which is more important to them at that moment, than ethical considerations. The same theme is touched on in the book The Reader, quite a powerful book, in my opinion. Personally, I think indoctrination is a really powerful weapon. I believe people's brains are like sponges. I would go even further, war criminals are not only obeying the rules, but they really believe they are doing right as well.

 

That's the one I couldn't remember it's name thank you. It was a game show and they recreated the experiement with similar results created a huge amount of fuss.

 

Well my evil character (Well, in fact two. The 99% evil character is in a spiritual form while the 35% evil has a human body, one lives inside the other) is going to die pretty soon so there is not much time to make him evil, but he did kill thousands of people over a period of 350 years and dumped the remains into a lake, filling it with corpses and all other thinks I do not want to talk about.
But my second evil character I have designed is a vampire. He kills people for fun without even drinking their blood and goes around with his trembling hands and dead skin.
Really the keys to evil characters are horrible actions and points of view that would make outer people outraged (Eg. all women should be burned etc).

 

I have a question of mine own:

Can ambition be a good motive? I've read a lot of books (and I mean alot!) and some have vengenance as their motive and it's a good one, but in a book I'm writing, to start it off I chose ambition. Is this alright?

 

Or they thought, "If the subject dies, it's the researcher's responsibility, not mine."

Some. Others really enjoy being cruel and sadistic, like some concentration camp guards.

At that point in time, vegetarianism wasn't seen as an animal-ethics issue, but as a health issue - it was believed to be a part of a clean and healthy living. Health nuts and athletes were often vegetarians.

It sounds like a very realistic motive. Ambition motivates people to backstab their competitors and do illegal things in real life.

 

However Hitler's reasons seem to have included the animal element. He was noted for his kindness to animals and affinity with children.

 

Whenever a discussion on antagonists comes up, Hitler and the Nazis always make an appearance (predictably).

Little wonder, then, that too many book and movie villains are similar, cliched, and boring - everybody's looking to the same source for inspiration.

 

In contrast, how many flesh and blood devils do we have, that everyone in the world instantly recognizes as an example of the epitome of evil?

Hitler has become a universal axiom for the incarnation of evil, more relevant than the actual devil of Christendom, because Hitler is actually real for the non-Christians as well.

Then again, history is written by the winners of war, so obviously he is going to be demonized. I'm confident that there exists some accounts of Nazi atrocities that have been exaggerated or fabricated, however nothing says reality like the old black and white newsreel footage of mountains of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves at the Nazi death camps. A picture says a thousand words.

 

I'm afraid you completely missed my point.

Re-using Hitler and the Nazis over and over as prototypes for fictional villains creates repetitions of same old same old Hollywood-esque villains. I understand that cliches are unavoidable in some aspects of written fiction, but villain-creation is not one of these areas. After all, numerous real-life people have harmed others in the process of attaining all kinds of goals. There is no excuse to go, "Oh, yeah, I need a villain; who should I base it on? Let me think - Hitler! Works every time, so why not?"

I can think of many books which could have been much improved had the author thought of a more original villain. Take Harry Potter and Pendragon, both series that I have enjoyed greatly for the most part. Harry Potter's villains, Tom Riddler Adolf Voldemort Hitler and the SS Death Eaters, left me yawning in the end. Not to mention that JK Rowling's close adherence to the Nazi prototype raised some bad parallels with the whole pure-bloods versus mud-bloods thing. Obviously, she was trying to echo Nazi emphasis on racial purity, but her spin on nationalist ideology falls flat, and this is why: race is inheritable and magic ability (according to her system) is not. Non-magic people like Hermione's parents and Lily's parents can have magic children (powerful ones, to top it off), and magic people can have non-magic children, like Mrs. Figg. Now, if you contrast this with the fact that an Asian couple can't make a Caucasian child, a Black couple can't make an Asian child, and a German man + a Japanese woman = a Eurasian kid (neither White nor Asian, but both), it becomes obvious that magic ability in JK Rowling's universe isn't really a heritable trait after all, which makes Voldemort look like a moron for his emphasis on "pure-blood witches and wizards" - why should pure blood matter if magic has little to do with blood? Moronic villains tend to be eye-roll inducing, which diminishes their scare-power. Voldemort would have made more sense as a villain if his only goal had been to enslave non-magic people to serve wizard/witch kind. Alas, JK Rowling apparently felt the need to emphasize her source of inspiration - "Look, I based them on Nazis! Genius! Nobody ever did this before . . . right?"

Perhaps I sound overly annoyed, but I think my irritation is justified. The fantasy genre in particular has so much potential, but people insist on re-using safe old themes and devices. Like the authors who insist on popping out clone after clone of Lord of the Rings, but that's a subject for a different rant.

As for Pendragon, the principle villain, Saint Dane, had a promising start. He was different, intriguingly so. He claimed he wanted to help out humanity, which was odd when taking into account all of his dastardly attempts to bring out the worst in humanity. He had no army and did all his work by infiltrating various groups and instigating them against each other - now that's something new! It appeared that he wanted to force everybody and everything on all the inhabited worlds to merge for the purpose of creating a chaotic universe - quite unlike the Nazi prototype. Then, guess what: in the last books, it turns out that he was just another pseudo-Hitler after all, out to create a super-race with the help of his newly-acquired faithful Nazi stormtroopers - err, dado army. The fact that he discriminated on the basis of intelligence, creativity, and the like instead of things like race was a bit of a twist, but not enough to keep him from going from fascinating & original to cliched & predictable.

Here are some examples of real-life villains, which are sadly under-utilized as inspiration for fictional villains:
Josef Stalin: responsible for the deaths of ~23 million, largely White Christians. Responsible for the Holodomor, which was the Soviets' way of quashing Ukrainian national consciousness.
Mao Ze-Dong: responsible for deaths of ~49-78 million, largely because of his ludicrous & insane agricultural experiments.
Shiro Ishii: recognized as having conducted far more atrocities in the name of science than his German counterpart, Josef Mengele, yet curiously remains obscure.
Kim Il Sung (from North Korea): 1.6 million (purges and concentration camps.)

I'm certain that if one was to more closely examine the lives and legacies of the above, many original antagonists could be created. For example: perhaps the Dark Lord Quigglebaggle is considered a nasty piece of work by his people because he keeps trying out the latest insane agricultural experiment on them, tossing those who (predictably) fail to yield crops into jail or letting them starve as punishment. That would be a lot more interesting than making Quigglebaggle nasty because he wants to purge his country/yacht club/whatever of foreign elements or wants to create a super-race - we've already seen enough book villains with this goal, and it's just not interesting anymore (at least to me).

By the way, I think that many people don't realize that when they say that Hitler is the most evil man in history, their statement can be taken as implying that Jews are inherently of more worth than Gentiles. After all, when people speak of Hitler's legacy, the first thing to come up is the Jews' plight, and whenever anybody brings up the disasters of the WW2 era, it's always about the 6 million Jews and very rarely about, say, the many more millions of young non-Jewish men (on all sides of the war) who died fighting in terrible conditions or the millions of Ukrainians who starved to death in the Holodomor. [Will you look at this, the spell check's saying I wrote Holodomor incorrectly; it's suggesting "Hologram," "Holograph," or "Holocaust" instead .] Lastly, I would like to say that I don't think it's quite fair to compare any leader to Satan. If you read the Bible, you'll find that Satan's whole deal is that he wants to destroy all of humanity, no matter by what means, just to get back at God. Hitler wanted to uplift and preserve the German people, and he wasn't interested in wiping out all non-Germans like some people assert, apparently oblivious to the fact that Hitler had no beef with many different peoples, like the Italians or Muslims or Japanese. Similar arguments can be made for other leaders throughout history. A person who is evil incarnate isn't interested in helping anyone or achieving anything positive, period. I don't know why an evil-incarnate inspiration is necessary to begin with, seeing as evil-incarnate characters tend to be every bit as boring as Mary Sues and Marty Stus.