Show Me Your Villains!

This quote has been circulating on Facebook recently and I thought it was interesting:

“The story of villains is much more entertaining than the story of heroes, because monsters are not born, they are made.” They do not emerge from the void or darkness by themselves, but they are shaped by circumstances, by the wounds of the world around them. They reflect the deepest of human pain, rejection, loneliness, misunderstanding. A hero is defined by his acts of bravery, but a villain is the result of a heart that was once pure and ended up corrupted. The monsters, in their tragedy, show us what could happen to us all, if the world turned its back on us.” -- Mary Shelley
(i have not looked into where she said this, btw, but we'll go with it!)​

So, now I'm curious about your villains and want to start a Villain thread.
I'll go first....

 

Syndra is my villain and yesterday I actually wrote a chapter from her POV.

She's presented as an arrogant, hostile woman who is obsessed with the MMC. She doesnt like the FMC presumably because she likes the MMC, and she manipulates the village into turning on her. She attempted to murder the FMC when they were children... attempted to poison her as an adult, and then out right tries to drown her by the end.

In the chapter i wrote yesterday, we see her through the years... age 3, she sees her mother abused by her father and her mother normalize it with "its just what people do". age 9, we see her best friend (the MMC) being taken away and her father normalize it with "people just leave". age 11, we see her father spiraling into depression after her mom left and her aunt normalizes it "desert nomads are nomads for a reason". age 16, we see her in an unhealthy relationship where she hits and berates him (eventually she kills him accidentally in a blind fit of rage as an adult) and seeks the comfort of her friend (the MMC, who has returned) but he left again without a word. The final scene, we see her in the present. She blames her mother (who was a desert nomad) for her father's pain. she blames her father for people leaving in her life. and, now that her friend (the MMC) is back for good, she fears the FMC (another desert nomad) will cause the pain that her mother caused her and her family.

 

Honestly, all my characters are villains. Not going to lie. It just happened that way. Only a few are heroic by any means. Only two characters from my favorite work in progress about Ancient Rome are what I might consider 'too pure for this world'. Everyone else is morally gray or just evil/or somehow unthinkable evil. (Looking at all the Roman Emperor characters in my Ancient Rome story.)

For Space Magic that I am writing at the moment, the two main characters might be 'good guys', but they are not heroic. In fact, there is a huge twist that flips this on its head.

Dark Caverns, all the characters are messed up in some way. Only 2 I might consider to be 'good' by normal standards. But both are victims of horrible crimes. So, really bad things happens bingo??

But yeah, most of my characters are villains. Most of my villains are just more evil than the heroes or could be seen as heroes.

I love the quote you put at the top of this thread. Because it resonates so much with how I write/understand evil characters.

 

My villains are rarely out and out villains.

One of my villains is an evil god-Emperor, but like Leto Atreides, he's doing it to prepare his world for something even worse than what he's doing. He's accepted his role as destiny, but in doing so, has lost everything. While my protagonist has also lost everything, but is trying to fight the destiny that dictates that - and loses.

Another of my protagonists is a man who is so obsessed with becoming a "hero" that he has projected his fantasy onto a girl and has become her unknowing captor and tormentor, and that makes him a "villain", for part of the story. He just doesn't realise he's doing it.

Because my villains are people too (well, most of them are, anyway). Come to think of it, the total villains I have written are all non-human. I have a vampire. Not a vampire with feeeeelings, just a blood-sucking undead corpse. He's a villain.

 

Yeah, my character Syndra is like this. In her mind, she is the good guy rescuing her friends, family, and village from the "evil outsider" who is going to destroy their way of life. She has a savior complex. She doesnt realize that what she is doing is wrong because she's so blinded by "i have to keep everyone safe!"

 

Yup. My guy is so convinced he's the main character in *his* own story and that's he's supposed to be the hero that it blinds him to the fact that he's not the main character in *her* story.

 

Hmm, my villain is pretty bog-standard villainous. He's the skeezy pastor of a megachurch who has some limited magical powers (way-beyond-norm charisma) and is using them, as well as the powers of other supernaturally-enabled people he basically enslaves, to glorify God but mostly enrich himself.

On the other hand... Satan Herself appears in my story. She's not the villain. The War in Heaven that resulted in Her and Her angels being cast out was actually a union action that She undertook after the slaughter of the firstborn in Exodus. Having to kill that many people gave the angels serious PTSD and mental health issues, so Satan organized a strike. The eventual outcome was that She and the angels She organized got exiled from Hell, lost Eternity and were bound to linear time, and ended up in charge of purifying sinful souls in preparation for their entry into Heaven. Not pleasant work, but better than the alternative.

I freely admit that this was inspired by a quote from the 1995 Christopher Walken movie The Prophecy:

Good luck finding a copy, but if you do, please let me know where. Don't break site rules

 

Let’s see…

Villains in “The Skull in the Tree”:

• Rian Mac Colla, a carpenter whose childhood sweetheart married the village blacksmith while he was off on his apprenticeship, so he cuts a deal with a demon to curse her and her family. She miscarries, their smithy burns down, her husband vanishes without a trace when he heads to the city to buy replacement tools…all calibrated to ruin her life so his shoulder will be the one she cries on. And it would’ve worked if the heroine hadn’t passed through on an entirely unrelated journey.
• Old Man Oak, an ancient demon sealed inside an even more ancient oak tree to end its murderous rampage. Ever since, it’s fostered bloodshed in the hope of weakening its bonds and eventually escaping. Sometimes it uses dreams, sometimes it makes deals, and sometimes it takes a more direct approach using enthralled wolves. Rian bought his curse from Old Man Oak, and it can only be broken with the demon’s destruction.

“One Bitter Note”:

• Hunold is more or less the Pied Piper. A minstrel just barely scrapping by until he found an enchanted aulos in a ruined shrine. Thanks to its seductive music, he’s finally able to live the life he thinks he deserves…until an ataman who hires him for a festival stiffs and tries to murder him. After recovering from his wounds, he comes back, uses the aulos to ensorcel all the children in the village and leads them off to the ruined shrine, where he sacrifices them to a forgotten set of muses.
  • By the time the story starts, he’s wracked by paranoia à la “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and it only gets worse when the heroine antagonist sits down at his campfire. He can’t quite tell whether she knows what he’s done or he’s just overreacting, he’s desperate not to get caught, he tries to mislead her and it only makes his situation more delicate…so much fun to write. The man’s nowhere near as brilliant or talented as he thinks, and it does him in in the end.

 

My username is the initials of a villain.

WXR (Mr. Wai) is a children's story villain, so he's not super-complex. He's a shape-shifting alien and the worst thing he's done so far is to disguise himself as a teacher to steal lab equipment from the school. Might give him a redemption arc in the future.