Preventing people from liking my villain.

For one thing, boosting a fragile self-esteem. Tearing down someone else's confidence is the only way some people can feel less a loser or a victim.

 

My apologies. I thought you were asking a question. Incidentally, the word you're looking for is "assert", not "asset".

 

Why wouldn't you want people to like your villain? They're so much more interesting when they have a quality about them we can relate to, or can't get enough of.

 

To be fair, perhaps she's just afraid we'd like the villain to the point where we'd root for him and not the hero.

 

stormcat: I think I have an answer that may help Make the villain so evil so bad so wicked that it will be impossible for your readers to liking the villian

 

Maybe its because I love grey characters and stories without clearly black and white sides, but why this insistance that no one can be allowed to like the villain?

The only option might be to go "over-the-top" which of course might actually hurt the story rather than aid it.

EDITED: As for motivations I could imagine a desire to avenge slights or wrongs (real or imagine) can also work for a motivation.

 

Yes, this is what I've been trying to get across.

 

It's impossible. The villain could get fans who decide he got a rough deal by the book and he's not that bad at all. Then, they'll write fanfic that tells "his" side of the story. And the more you push how bad he is, the more his fans will rebel and insist he's not.

For an example, see Wicked.

 

The best villains are the ones we hate, but understand. Very very few people are just cruel for the point of cruelty. Even the worst people in history had their reasons, had things they believed in that they pursued relentlessly.

Example: Hitler. The world hates Hitler (most of it anyway). But despite all of his carnage, his desire for power, and the deaths he caused; he was still a man. He had reasons for what he did, things he believed in, experiences that brought him to the point he is now. He fought in WW1 and watched his country go to hell, so he rose up to change Germany for the better. In some ways, we can sympathize with who he started out as and we can follow the road that lead him to the leader of Nazi Germany. This makes him a real person, because he was a real person. He was human, despite all the terrible acts he committed. He deserves to be hated for the monster he became, but the person he was makes it all the worse.

If a villain is just cruel, mean, and violent without any cause, right, or reason; then they are not interesting. If you try so hard to make us hate them, then we will hate them for what they do, not who they are. The greatest villains are ones we root against with all our beings but still understand why they do what they do. If you make him just something for the MC to conquer and grow stronger from, then he can serve that purpose and nothing else. But to make him memorable, make us understand more about him and what lead him to where he is. Understanding him does not lead to rooting for him, it does not make us instantly desire him to end up alright at the end. What it does do is help us view him as an actual person, not just a literary thing created for the MC to defeat.

 

I personally am one of those sick souls who enjoy reading and understanding to villain. Because- damn it- they're so much more interesting than a goood guy!

Of course, if the good guy has some sort of vulnerable aspect to him, then it makes his plight a lot more enjoyable. I mean...his adventure. Not his plight. But anywho, I kinda get that you've tried to give your main character some amount of problems, but what about her personality? Does she have certain flaws there, too? As people have alread mentioned, you shouldn't focuse so hard on people hating the villain.

Just because someone kills people and tortures people, it can have the reverse effect of hatred and instead lead to humour. You don't want to get too fanatical about the readers hating your character! People can be hated just through breaking the main character's trust, or perhaps trampling over someones dreams. It doesn't take murder and torture for people to hate someone.

I get this is a whole I-hate-Twilight-thing, totally get it, but whether or not your readers are going to see that, or whether you'd lose readers because some of them do like Twilight, I don't know.

All I'd say really was calm down with your evil villain. At the moment, it sounds a bit desperate and a little frothing-at-the-mouth, if you get my drift. A character like that could really ake your main character's heroism boring.

Remember human nature, don't get carried away in scribbling out a grotesque image of a person, we need depth, realism. This evil dude's a person too. Villains become frightening because we can believe that these things could twist a person. If it seems completely unbelievable, it'll probably just end up funny.

 

I agree with Jack Asher: your villain lacks understandable and realistic motivations. It seems to exist just to prove a point. Something like: he's like EC from the (in)famous novels, but look! He's unambiguously bad. Can you see it reader? Can you see the implications? Needless to say, that seems really...well. Not read-worthy it's the only thing that comes to mind at the moment.
I wouldn't read a novel/story used not-so-subtiley by an author as a pamphlet about what she likes or dislike in literature. On the other hand, I would happily read a novel/story where charachters are well-developed and realistic individuals, not simply placeholders or plot development devices.

I suggest working more on the motivations: "desire for power" is a rather broad, non-descriptive and generic idea. It's like asking to a newly PhD in geology: "what was the subject of your final essay?" and hearing a simple "Oh, it was about Yellowstone caldera". Well...ok, if we're doing elevator small-talk. But here were're reviewing your work, doctor. Could you be more specific?

As a side note, one easy way to make your readers BURN with hatred is to have an adversary/main enemy doing something truly heinous and permanent to a beloved character, not necessarily a main one. Obviously the beloved character have to be well-developed, well-motivated in its actions and with some kind of clear and realistic place in the narrative...and the heinous acts should be well-motivated too. But that, I think, should be clear by now. An example?
Think about all the crap that happens to characters left and right in George R. R. Martin series "A song of Ice and Fire": people die, people get maimed or mentally scarred (or both). People lose loved ones, lose faith, lose their sense of morality. If the charachters are loved and well-written, the readers will positively hate any kind of enemy threathening them.

 

Look at Dolores Umbridge. No one's going to say they like the woman who pretty much turned Hogwarts into a police state, threw Dumbledore out, banned Harry from Quittich and made him carve a false statement in the back of his hand with a cursed quill. She was mean, vicious, egotistical, yet she believed she was doing a good thing.

It's not so much what they do, but their reasoning behind it that they use to justify their actions is what makes them a well-rounded villain. It's how we could look at them and see a bit of ourselves in them that makes them horrifying.

Let's pretend for a moment that I wrote a book set after WWII, and the antagonist is a child-abuser. The antagonist has an adopted German kid, but s/he does nothing but treat the German kid cruelly. Now let's say I painted a backstory where the antagonist suffered heavily under German occupation, saw his brother die in a battle against the Germans, etc. How helpless, how powerless this antagonist felt. The point I would want to get across is that this person is abusing this German kid as (a) revenge, (b) a way to feel the power he/she never had, and (c) humiliate the kid as he/she was humiliated. While we would, hopefully, not agree with it, we could (I hope) understand where this person is coming from.

Now, how would I make you all hate this antagonist? A number of ways. Maybe the German kid is disabled/deformed and he, too, put up with a lot of suffering, but the antagonist doesn't want to see it. The antagonist sees this disability as an excuse to see the kid as inhuman and, ironically, is adapting the very mindset of his/her oppressors. But see, this antagonist doesn't think he/she is doing anything wrong. He/she thinks he/she is doing the right thing.

I'm not sure if that was a good example or not, but the points I'm trying to get across are these:

+ It's the justifications for their actions that makes a villain terrifying.

+ Making us sympathetic/understand the villain on some level doesn't mean we root for the villain 100% and want him/her to win. It just means we can put ourselves in their shoes and wonder if we'd do the same thing.

 

Well @Burlbird even if we had put the Godwin counter back, it's well and truly fucked now.

 

Don't blame @CastleEra , Jack and Burl. Blame Hitler. He started it.

 

It's all his fault.

 

Now, now...stop with this madness. What's next? A detailed analysis of how Operation Sealion could be a success? XD

 

Historium, a history forum I used to frequent would talk about 'what if' scenarios like this. It was...interesting, I guess? I dunno, I never much cared for that period of history. :/


Except for when I actually did have a question about that period, then I started caring and asking the questions.

 

The best villians are those that are both loved and hated simultaneously. You want your readers to look forward to meeting your villians as much as your heroes.

 

This is an interesting problem which I encounter from time to time as well. Some of my book ideas revolve around a villain instead of a hero, because I ask myself "what if a villain tried to do this" and develop a book idea about it. For those book ideas, though, it can be hard to make a hero which is strong enough to combat this villain. Not just strong enough physically, but strong enough from the standpoint of the reader. If the villain is significantly more interesting to the author than the protagonist, then I guess the author has to do some serious reworking of the idea. That said, there's nothing wrong with having a good villain, in my opinion, but the original poster of this topic is right in that the hero cannot be a weak character compared to the villain.

 

Torturing animals is a good one but I have a special something of an idea for you; make him betray the reader. In the Nolan Batman films (which are a little too much rightwing and a little too little Nightwing IMO) the Joker tells a story about how he got his scars; his daddy was a drinker and yadayada he had a messed up childhood. Then, later he tells a different story about his scars, so he's not just manipulating the characters but bullshitting the reader too and this will upset people because they tried to be understanding of his motivations but ultimately he was a liar, and that, by itself, is uncomfortable for the reader because he is unknowable.

So he tortures a girl then says "it's because I love you so much, you make me do these things!" and then a split-second later, a hotter women shows up and goes and f*cks her instead. What makes the better betrayal; that he tortures the new girl because she's a better victim? Or that he's actually just nice to her and quite romantic? You choose.

 

Well, a start would be rather than telling people all the bad things he does, do it by showing the pleasure he gets in destroying someones life. But it will be tough to not have someone like him. Good case is American Psycho, he was totally crazy, even tried to stuff a kitten in an ATM (because it asked him to feed it a kitten). But I love that movie and his crazyness. Stick with rather than a list of awefull things focus mainly on the woman-beating, child killing parts, that's about as bad as a man can get. Other than looking like Edward of course