In a writing project of mine, I’v designed two different characters, who I’ll call the Villain and the Hero. I’d like to hear what you think. The Villain I hope is unsympathetic but interesting. He’s the eldest son of the king, but was banished for an unspecified crime. He then began to plot his return, allying with another nation and sending messages to various sympathetic lords. When his father dies, he takes the Capital by storm and executes his younger brother, nephew, niece-in-law, and his nephew’s children. His first act is to have his surviving nephew's (the Hero's) eye removed, and then plots to have his niece and nephews married to his own children to cement his legitimacy. However, they are stolen out of the Capital, and then the Hero declares war on him. As the war escalates into a world war, he grows more deranged and violent. He degrades from a charismatic yet brutal leader into a half-insane animal, before his death. The Hero is a cold, ruthless young man embittered by loss. He never wanted to rule, nor did he consider himself suited, but as the eldest son it’s his duty to defeat the Villain. Due to invoking a foreign alliance, he draws the entire world into his family disputes, and he severely regrets it. As the War drags on, he grows more mellowed, even finding sympathy for his foes and regretting the fact that his uncle is insane and unreachable. He’s not much of a people person, but is surprisingly good at speeches. The Hero is never a viewpoint character, so we never discover what exactly goes on in his head save for what he says to his friends and family. He doesn’t seem to ever recognize when people are romantically interested in him, with his response to a beautiful woman on his lap being to complain that he’s trying to engage in diplomacy. It’s left ambiguous in the story if he ever marries or has children, but it’s implied that he never does.
Personally I think these characters are still a bit two dimensional and not that interesting, but in the actually writing they could be so it's very hard to give feedback on this. If these were my characters I would now focus on the conflicts for both, internal and external. I think the hero needs to have no interested in his goal of stopping the villain other than it's his responsibility. I would focus on the wounds of these characters (their motivation and why they think they are in the right or if they know they are not why do they continue?) and bring those to the fore front and delve deeper into those feelings. I would make there 'wants' a driving force. So a character might want acceptance and they think the way to get it is through force so their goal becomes frightening people. The goal and the want can and often are separate things. I would make the stakes clear for each if the other fails. They just need more fleshing out and that may be done on the page.
Good points. However, the hero does have other reasons: his siblings are in danger, his father and brother (as well as other family members) were brutally killed, and his uncle is a brutal tyrant. The villain, on the other hand, feels humiliated by his father after his banishment, and believes the throne to need to go to him to restore the honor of his family. Ironically, family is very important to the villain. It’s just that he prefers his children over his brother and nephews.
