Working on a novel, and I have the basic premise as a villain who wants to test the hero. Truly test him by capturing him and giving him only bad choices. The goal is to break the hero because the villain deep down is insecure that he couldn't overcome his bad choices and doesn't want to believe anyone else can either. I want each dilemma to be symbolic of the villain's early life, specifically chosen to represent a moment in his life he believes he was in a no win situation and have the hero go through it now only worse. My question is simple: what would be good challenges to go through? I don't want it to only take an emotional toll (think "kick the chair" dilemma) but I also want physical, literal torturous examples as well. Moral dilemmas across the board that can impact him emotionally, physically, spiritually, etc. Any ideas? The bad guy is basically Jigsaw in this role.
It may help to know the type of history the villain has. What type of country or family do they come from? What have they lost or how have they failed?
My world's version of America. I haven't dove super deep into his backstory but I've envisioned him as a man who grew up modestly, was beat down by the system, became desperate, made bad choices out of said desperation leading to even worse results, lost everything (family, livelihood, etc.), and then ended up becoming a monster (figuratively, not literally) obsessed with proving no one could come out of what he went through unscathed.
Nice idea.... would be very eager to see where you go with it. My suggestion would be for him to kidnap the mc, then create fake identification for them as to make him seem like a poor person and cut him off from anything he had before, then frame him for a petty crime. Let the system take it from there. The villain can even pose as a guard and have some pretty interesting dialog with you mc.
Exhalent idea. Not the type of moral dilemma found in most novels. Cutting the MC off from everything they have know would be a good start. If you are going for something with lasting trauma than finding a way for the villain to trick the MC into believing no one cares about them could go down well. You would have lasting trust issues with the MC, and it would offer interesting plot points later. Messing with the MCs perception of time would also be a form of torture that would leave lasting marks. Hope this was helpful!
Reminds me of Silence, I think it's called, this film based on a period of Japanese history when they eradicated Christianity from Japan. Rather than demanding for the renouncing of faith from the followers, the guy in charge tortured the followers in front of the pastor, and demanded the pastor renounced his faith in order to set his followers free. I don't need to explain why this is a horrible moral dilemma and what impact the pastor himself renouncing his faith could/would do to the followers - or the impact of him not renouncing it could do. So, if you're wanting something more than simple physical torture, you'd want to pit people against each other, but not just any random stranger. They must mean something to each other. Drown two of your MC's children and see which one he saves. That sort of thing. However, your premise sounds exactly like Saw, which you're clearly aware since you reference Jigsaw. What makes your premise fresh, is what I'd wanna focus on. Torture porn is not interesting and that trend has faded, I think. Personally, and disclaimer here as I'm neither a Saw fan nor a horror fan here, I think you're asking the question the wrong way. Think first what the themes are, what you want your character to question, and then build his back story and your villain's back story from there. Once you have this foundation, the ways to test your MC would become clear. Otherwise, the backstory becomes an excuse to write gratuitous violence, as opposed to the violence expressing anything worth reading.
I'm no fan of torture porn myself. It's all story driven but I do want to give the audience the sense of "I'd have given up by now". I should mention this is a sequel so I don't have nearly as much leeway with the hero. The villain I do. The way you worded this makes a lot of sense and should help.
Short dive into villain psychology: I wouldn't call him insecure, the fact that he goes to these lengths just to prove that everyone else would have turned out as he did shows that he's a complex and conflicted character- there clearly is a part inside him that rejects what he has become and needs the validation that he is not to blame for his own deeds. Now putting the MC into a dilemma like this would yield two possible outcomes: 1. The hero fails the test- he becomes as broken and corrupt as the villain. Result: The villain feels justified, carries on monstering, so actually nothing really changes for him. 2. The hero succeeds where the villain did not. Result: the villain would psychologically break apart. So there is one possible outcome where the villain gains next to nothing and one where he loses everything. Now, why would he even do this? Because the part of his personality that rejects his ways is stronger than he thought. Because he secretly wants the hero to win. He needs him to win. To show him that nothing is predetermined, we can still take charge of our fate and ultimately become better versions of ourselves. So he puts the MC into a dreadful dilemma that cannot be solved- similar to the dilemma that broke him and turned him into the monster he is now. And yet there is a way out: by injecting himself into the equation, by sacrificing himself to save the hero and solve the dilemma, the villain gets the one thing that he really craved for all along: redemption.
So a good example of what I think you're trying to achieve was done in The Dark Knight when the Joker gave the passengers of the two ferryboats the option of killing each other or killing themselves. That scene is intense and touches on something real to the human experience, which is how we often use our own image of ourselves as "good people" to justify decisions that ultimately harm others. It was a situation which the Joker was trying to prove a point that people will turn into monsters when faced with an impossible choice. However, if you paid attention to the film, this was a theme that came up again, and again, and again in different ways. So, where am I going with this: unless this event is going to make the entire plot of the story and not just one moment, the characters of your story should be faced with this dilemma over and over again in different ways, with different characters making different choices. So this is what brings me up with my question, to help you answer yours. What other games had this villain played with other characters and what were the results?
This is brilliant, and reminds me of the fact that bullies secretly want to be put in their place and are always testing authority figures to see if they're capable of doing it. If not, the bullies run rampant but their self-loathing expands to monstrous proportions. Bullies are generally people with a parent who abuses them physically and has never taught them right from wrong but only that might is right and the strong take whatever they want from the weak. You can actually see the relief on the part of the bully when a strong authority figure puts them in their place, and then they settle in and sometimes become much better people at least in that class or situation. Though of course there's also a lot of negative emotions going on, at least at first. And what is a villain but a mega maniacal bully? Both seem to be people incapable of regulating their own worst impulses who desperately look for someone stronger than themselves who understands their psychology in order to get them under control
Incidentally this explains why most schools/administrators/principals etc are afraid to punish bullies, because then they'll have to deal with the monster who made the little monster. So much easier to silence the victim, who won't make any waves and whose parents are decent people, or to just say "Now now, you two need to stop fighting, shake hands and make up", as if both are equally to blame. It's cowardice really.
This reminds me of the movie Brubaker, in which Robert Redford was the new warden of a prison and wanted to see how the conditions are inside, so before anyone had met him or knew what he looked like he had himself booked as an inmate, but somebody knew what he was doing and made sure he wouldn't be able to get out again. Based on a true story I think.
Something to think about is that the MC may not see certain things as a moral dilemma, after all the two characters have different backgrounds and views. I think it is important to show that the Villan knows the main character, his strengths his weaknesses, what his fatal flaw is. Have the amount of knowledge the villain has on the character shock him. Use that shock to carry the plot. introduce some psychedelics to the MC starts to see hallucinations in the tasks. Make it hard for the MC. (A good reference for this is the Scarecrow in Batman comics) Have the villain record the MC'S action and then replay it to him over and over again, highlighting the dubious choices, piling on the guilt. I think the biggest breaking point for an MC is realizing that their fatal flaw is what can destroy them or skew their image of themselves.
A good moral dilemma for any story involves choosing between the Many versus The Few. In other words, when faced with a choice of sacrificing the Few to save the Many, what's the ethical choice here? Sacrificing 'yourself' to save others is a fairly common situation in fiction (and maybe in real life as well) but that only tests a person's selfish need for survival. The Many Versus The Few means a person must actually weigh up numbers/and or 'deserving' notions—presumably the person him/herself will survive either way. Who deserves to live and who deserves to die? If nobody 'deserves' to die, but some must be sacrificed, who draws the short straw? How is that determined? And is determining that ever justified?
Can't tell if serious It's an illustration of a well-known moral dilemma (well-known to philosophy) used often in classrooms and on message boards: "There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?" Trolley problem @ Wikipedia It's often modified by for instance the one person being a baby, or maybe someone you know. Variations of this were used in I think the 2nd Dark Knight movie, where the Joker messaged Batman that he had Harvey Dent (the new district attorney and current hero of Gotham) trapped in one location and about to be killed, and Bruce Wayne's girlfriend in a location on the far end of town, with a bomb about to go off. He only had time to rescue one of them. And then the Joker rigged 2 ships full of people with explosives and placed a remote detonator in each ship, with a note saying that if you blow up the other ship everyone on your boat gets to live. This is a somewhat different thought experiment to see if people's desperate instinct for self-protection overwhelms their desire to help others and trust that they'll do the same.
On another message board where I used to hang out a lot of people refused to take any action at all, believing that removes all moral culpability. The old "But I didn't do anything, just let nature take its course" defense. To me that seems to be more about whether you'll get in trouble after the fact, rather than about actually struggling with the problem and trying to figure out what's right. My position on it was that making the choice is taking an action—by deciding to do nothing they condemned the 5 people to death.
This is better for the debate board but if they take action they will condemn one person, so a big factor is the conflicting rights to live or not have violence inflicted upon you. That's why the transplant version (where one person has two perfectly healthy kidneys, a liver, heart, lungs, etc. but there are 5-6 people about to die without them is better because the conflicting 'rights' are more obvious.
I don't think you understood, but then I probably didn't explain it well enough. I came to realize that the people who refused to take any action at all thought it made them free of any moral culpability. In other words they were concerned about 'getting in trouble' after the fact—they were planning to say "I didn't kill anybody, I took no action." In other words they think refusing to wrestle with the dilemma at all means they didn't make a choice, but what I'm saying is they made the choice to do nothing and let the 5 people die. Because we have to take the parameters of the thought experiment seriously—they can't say "I didn't know the lever would shunt the car off the tracks". That was a given, that they were aware of the what the lever does. Yes, I totally agree, if they pull the lever then they've made the other choice, to kill the 1 person. But either way, they're making a choice and that's what's at issue here. I see the "I didn't do anything" defense as moral cowardice. Either way you made a choice, just by the way the experiment is set up that's a given. They're trying to act as if they had no agency, but they took action internally by choosing to do nothing and then use the "I didn't do anything, so I can't be held responsible" defense to make themselves feel better. It's a reflexive way of trying to avoid moral culpability, to avoid being seen as an agent who makes choices and should be held responsible for them.
My opinion. Many do not understand, but any action has a downside. When someone rises, someone falls. When someone is saved, someone has been allowed to suffer and die. Now imagine a hero in the arena fighting in turn against people whose lives have been destroyed through his fault. Learn their stories of ordinary life and how everything was destroyed as a result of the hero's actions. These people hate him and try to make him pay for what he did. The hero has two options either to allow himself to be punished, or to push them even deeper into the abyss of their hatred and despair, beating them and showing their insignificance and helplessness. Thus, he himself turns ordinary people into criminals and villains. Again, the question is raised do the heroes create the majority of their villains so that they have someone to fight with? To be able to present yourself as heroes. As Anarchy (one of Batman's villains) said, "Didn't you think that until you showed up all these freaks weren't here. Maybe it's your fault that the whole city is in such a state."
Yeah, if they said that, that's a cop out. So I guess these people don't think Walt killed Jane or had anything to do with it? (One could argue that it was OK to let Jane die because she was probably going to get Jesse killed too eventually, but you'd at least be recognizing that there is a choice to be made). There are some people (in some scenarios, me) that wouldn't take action because they think in the situation the single person's right to not have harm done to them trumps the requirement to save others already in danger. There's probably no clear argument that is flawless uness someone already adheres to some strict philosophy like utilitarianism, etc.
Yeah, now you get where I'm coming from. To be clear, I don't think there's an objectively right or wrong response. Someone is going to die, your only choice is who? The 5 or the 1? Where it gets interesting to me is when people add on that extra little part, where they're trying to say "I can't be held responsible." Being held responsible isn't about moral culpability, it's for the courtroom after the fact, or for society after the fact. They're trying to shift the agency to physical action, but I believe the agency and the moral culpability takes place at the level of the choice you make. Do you allow the 5 to be killed, or do you allow the 1 to be killed? Make your choice, but either way accept that you've made it and that you do bear moral responsibility for that choice.
