Villain's ultimate goal

He enjoys watching people suffer. Controlling their lives, playing God. He is greedy, and drunk on power. He is also a narcissist who believes he is entitled to have whatever he wants, and has no qualms exterminating entire nations to reach his goal. The goal might be laying his hands on a valuable resource, burying the truth about his own wrongdoing (he is also an interminable hypocrite), sending the message to anyone else who would rebel against him etc. It's all quite realistic, and seen in human history many times over. Start from there.

 

Could just be a jerk

 

Or a Yank?

 

I think its much easier to treat the villain as the hero of their own story; and even write a good amount of notes and authorial passages to understand the villain intimately. A good villain is a bit psychotic, or has traits of a very aggressive individual, dedicated to fulfilling their task with a strong will. You get into minions, you need charisma and authority. Do it yourself, you need strength and unshakable resolve. A villain for a hero can be as simple as the research professor who takes credit for a student's work or as complex as a cult figure seeking to bring about world peace by conquering the world through diplomacy and assassinations.

 

I think that saying the villain is just bad sucks... The villain needs to have some back story and a goal like heroes. The heroes always have the ultimate goal to destroy the villain, the villain need a goal like this as well.

 

I like to think of villains as characters whose actions and views directly oppose those of the protagonist. Doesn't necessarily mean the villain is evil, nor does it mean that the protagonist is a hero. They're just people who found themselves on opposite sides of some great conflict, for whatever reason.

 

Forget the term villain. You have a protagonist and an antagonist. They each want something, but their goals are mutually exclusive. Neither thinks of themselves as evil. Robert Heinlein used to say that he didn't write his stories, he just placed two people with opposing goals together and recorded the result.

Since the winner gets to write the history book the term hero and villain are often the result of who won. The term villain is usually applied when the antagonist is particularly ruthless. But never forget that the difference between an extremest and a villain is that the extremest is on your side. And even the most evil villain may be kind to his mother.

 

I agree completely.

People usually have personal reasons to do the things they do, even if they are skewed in a troubled or diseased mind. The whole "I want to rule the world" type of megalomania is probably a rare psychiatric condition and bordering on the boring for novels. I always wondered... if the bad guy destroys everything, he's left with a burning cinder of ash and bones. Why would he want to rule that anyway?

Prejudice seems to work for a reason. A *insert fantasy race or kingdom citizen here* killed his wife, stole his son, didn't pick him for their volleyball team... so he now hates them all.