Even then, the limit of my sympathy extended to his child self. I had no sympathy for him as an adult, and I don't think there's any way Harris could have made me have it.
Oh okay, I haven't read the book Red Dragon, I am just going by the movie's portrayal. I wanted to generate some sort of understanding for my villains since they were treated as different or outcasts while growing up, which caused them to feel a lot of shame, which then turned to rebelling against society, after it built up over the years. I do not necessarily need my villains to be sympathetic, but when one villain feels sorry for another in my story, and tries to motivate others in joining, out of feeling sorry for them, and wanting to get them to claim "justice" for themselves (I mean the villain leader's idea of justice), I still want the reader to understand how the leader feels sorrow for the others, which causes him to form the group. So the villains do not need to be sympathetic, but the sorrow between the characters still needs to be understood by the reader. Is that do-able?
Sure, I think you can impart an intellectual understanding of why the villains are they way they are and why they do what they do.
Basically at the end the leader of the group regrets what he did, and undergoes a change. He feels that he has made these other group members' lives worse, by pushing them to become killers, and feels it was a bad thing to do, when the police are onto them and they are likely going to be caught. So he wants to do something to redeem his and the group's actions. Will the reader invest in the villains wanting redemption in the ending, if they are not empathetic to them at all, beforehand?
Frankly, no. The only redemption he can find is death. That's the narrative convention here. People who go way too far can be redeemed but they can only do it by dying. Even then that only gets him back to zero it doesn't make him sympathetic. Normal people do not need to kill people to figure out killing people is wrong. I can sort of vaguely see a single charismatic leader with an axe to grind recruiting kids who haven't really been hard done by but are angry and looking for leadership that not getting laid is a good enough reason to kill. But I just can't see a big bunch of people all coming to this same conclusion together. To look at Red Dragon; Francis Dolarhyde believes himself to be unlovable and ugly and fundamentally hates himself for it. His problem is not that he can't have sex it's that he believes that he is too deformed for anyone to love him but that's clearly not true. When he's not being a murderer he's actually quite sweet. The murderous part of him isn't logical; at some point he had a psychotic break. He has lucid periods (when 'the dragon' sleeps) but when he sees something that sets him off he isn't acting rationally. He never sat nursing his grudges at all the women who turned him down and finally decided to kill them. Something inside him compels him to kill. No-one can convince him not to. His problems are the result of an upbringing but it's super rare that anyone can screw kids up that badly. Children from what you might call 'regularly' abusive homes don't become murderers. Run aways who grow up on the streets don't either. Even children who grew up in the Balkans or Sudan or Darfur don't all become killers. Even the most extreme excesses of violence won't flip that switch. There's one thing that may be something you can look at though. There is a solid causal link between boys who were sexually abused by women and becoming a rapist. That (understandably) creates men with a lot of anger towards women and who never really had a taboo against rape. Whether that's the result of protracted abuse from women, violence and pain involved or bottling up of feelings for protracted period I don't know but some combination of these factors leads to men who are vastly more likely to rape than men in the general population. This might be a group of young men who might develop supremacist feelings and might be angry enough to escalate to murdering surrogates for the women who abused them. An interesting angle here is that they'd probably never present themselves as abuse victims even to each other (almost all male victims of female sexual abusers won't call themselves a victim) and may never even ask each other why they are angry. They spiral together via message boards never talking about the problem they have and, in the end that leads towards violence through groupthink and forming a cult of hatred around women. That's something that would put together the strands you want here. It gives you the kind of deep pathological anger that would be necessary to drive this kind of group, something far beyond just not getting laid. The kind of anger that wouldn't burn out by just raping or killing once. Add to that a charismatic leader who can give voice and group membership to their anger and you get something really dangerous. As long as he has the means to protect and reward members and plays up to their hatred then they'll follow and protect him in return. Each member might be dangerous alone but together they form a nihilistic cult of death; pack killers who push each other to be more 'devout' in their hatred and violence and will reinforce each others positions. This interpretation of their group puts the group as being something really really ugly but individual members as not necessarily so. Under all of this arm-band wearing rage there is a bunch of lost, vulnerable people who each has a part of them that is still six years old crying in the night. They are culpable, absolutely. They are killers because they wanted to kill. But something made them want to kill. The conflict between their choices and their free will and the ambiguity in whether these guys ever had a chance or not sets us up to not just hold them in contempt. We might fear them and even hate them but we see something human in them. They aren't hateful inadequates. We can understand their anger, even if we can't condone their actions.
I agree several times over, please do not make them evil because of some kind of inborn difficulty. No one is going to want to read a story about autistic serial rapists or that Joseph Merrick killed people because of his deformities. For information and backstories on your characters, do some research into real-life whackjobs (technical term) and well-known people you find despicable. In the first group, look to people like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy etc. The second group to look to is not legally criminal, but generally people you wouldn't want to be around. I don't know your politics, and I'm not going to bring mine into the discussion, but I'm sure you can find people in your government who you feel are sociopaths and dangerous to the citizenry and the nation. Look into their backgrounds. How were they raised? What are their beliefs? You'll get a lot less of a pushback from writing a villain who is similar to the leader of the [redacted] Party than from one who has a cleft lip. Finally, don't forget people like Ethan Couch, the "affluenza" "victim", or Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund manager who raised the price of a certain drug seven thousand percent (or something). IMHO, you've picked a tough topic to write, but I wish you the best. For the original question, how about having them name themselves "Mackey's Marauders", after the Tom Cruise "Respect the C*ck, Tame the C*nt" character in Magnolia? Sounds like the sort of guy they'd like.
No, it wasn't. The earliest uses of the word are talking about anarchistic and lawless societies. Those participating in the power struggle 'The Terror' in Revolutionary France were called 'Terrorists' by contemporary sources not in judgement of their governmental connection or because they enacted grisly punishments on civilians; this was commonly done by legitimate regimes too; they were called terrorists because their attacks on private citizens were seemingly random and arbitrary. No-one could feel safe because the violence knew no barrier and there was nothing a victim could say to dissuade attackers he was one of their enemies. In a period with no rule of law there was instead a 'reign of terror'. This is clearly not talking about governments using their state machinery to oppress their people (better known at the time as tyranny and today as totalitarianism) or the governments using non-legitimate means to attack other governments or extra-judicial groups (what we would today think of as State Terrorism). It's talking about unknowable, seemingly implacable groups who focus on attacking civilians to bring about political change. The Jacobite Risings (rebellions in England sponsored by France) have never been called terrorism, nor were the purges in, well, pick a country. Neither when the Reds were exterminating the Whites in Russia or the Nazis enacting pogroms against Jews in 1938 are 'terrorism' either. They are acts of political suppression. Terrorism is something very different. Right from the inception of the phrase it's has connotations of attacks carried out by citizens in furtherance of a political goal.
If a word's meaning has changed, it's hard to find its original meaning on the Internet. Same with historical references. And just so there's no misunderstanding, governments don't call their own activities terrorism and if I implied that, I assure you that was not my intent. What the Nazis (who were the government at the time) did to the Jews during the 1930s was called terrorism by everyone but the Nazis.
Okay thanks for the input. I already did research on people who cannot form relationships because of mental disorders. A lot of them are very bitter about it. None have resorted to violence, but I asked a psychologist, if it's possible for such a person to snap and become a killer, and he said yes, it was possible it could happen. As far as researching other types of serial killers, I don't think it will help the story, if they are doing it out of parental abuse. I know that parental abuse, is not always the cause of such actions, but a lot of these killers in real life, have some sort of problem with their parents it seems. Where as my main villain character, would not recruit people to go after women based on parental abuse. It's just not in his character, the way he grew up, and if I make a change like that, if might come off as out of character for him, or a forced change, that I cannot see him doing. So whatever changes I make, I think for his character to remain in character, the theme still has to be the same, that they are doing it, because they are being rejected by the opposite sex, since the character is all about that, theme wise. Plus do you think that maybe we are bringing too much psychology into it perhaps, when the concept is much more simple? Basically I find my story to be sort of a story like Frankenstein. In that story, the monster killed cause he was rejected by everyone and no one accepted him, and I feel that my characters are like that, and do not need more of a psychological problem, than that character had. Unless I am wrong? And you say that the only redemption for such a character is death. But what about turning himself into the police? The leader confesses to all the crimes, so if he turns himself in, can that be accepted just as much as death, since he is pleading guilty, and can receive the maximum penalty?
There's a couple problems I see here. First off, it's possible for *Anyone* to snap and start killing people, given the right circumstances. If I recall, one mass shooter had a brain tumor which effectively drove him insane. However, with developmental disorders, any rage or frustration is usually directed inward. After all, if you've got a problem interacting with people, you *know* what the problem is, and it's not the fault of the other person. There's a reason why the suicide rate for people with developmental disorders is so much higher than the rate for 'normal' people. Goimg aftet someone else *could* happen, but it's not any more likely for an autistic/handicapped individual than for anyone else. In short, yes, I think you don't need to bring any psychology into this. Just make your villain a terrible bastard who's evil because he's evil, and don't bother attributing any other reasons for it.
Okay thanks. The leader of the gang does not have a developmental disorder though. His loved one does, which is what causes him to form the gang, after his loved one kills himself, or something like that. So since the leader does not have one, could he develop the others into directing their frustration and rage outward, since he is directing them too? That's how I wrote it anyway, if that works.
