Samven's Writing Lectures

[Samven]

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3. Writing the Villain

Part One - Villainous Virtues

One of my favourite games ever is Breath of Fire II. By today’s standards it’s simplistic, awkwardly-translated and full of cliches. I can even recognise how, from a technical standpoint, it’s not all that creative. There are no real puzzles and levels amount to little more than walking through various kinds of mazes until you reach a boss.

Yet BoFII introduced me to a concept that my twelve year-old brain didn’t think was possible. A noble antagonist: specifically the character of Barubary.

Barubary was a great and powerful demon with whom the protagonist, Ryu, had a history. Throughout the game, it’s hinted that the monster has some connection to the overarching plot and, as eldritch horrors slowly begin to infest the world, it only becomes more and more apparent that the scorpion-like fiend has something to do with it. Gasp and alarm, he does and he’s planning to help the game’s ultimate villain wipe out humanity and turn the world into a hellish paradise for his kind.

And yet, Barubary always had a certain kind of honour about him. He was evil – of that there was no doubt – but one never got the impression that his feud with the hero was anything personal. Unlike most demons in the game, Barubary didn’t try holding hostages or throw any last-minute suicidal tantrums. While he had the usual bad guy trash talk, he didn’t rub his demonic power in the party’s face and his opinion of Ryu was high enough that he wanted to fight the lad one-on-one, as warriors do.

You see, what Barubary had is something that few other villains do. A sense of identity. He had a character. A personality. He had his own wants, his own wishes, his own hopes and his own desires. Sure, all of them involved defeating the hero in single combat to crush his hopes before tearing the world he’d fought to save apart but that’s demons for you. If Barubary had just been another grumpy sod clad in black and full of hate, then he might as well be a force of nature than a sentient antagonist. In the words of Albert Einstein, such a character “has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” This is why I’ve never really been able to take Square Enix games seriously, because every one of their villains has exactly the same goal and the same personality: “kill ‘em all” and “insanely evil”, respectively. There’s no reason that you can’t have a horrific, world-crushing villain but if he’s just another megalomaniac with a god complex then the question of what is special about him must be raised. Why should an audience care about a villain if he doesn’t bring anything new to the antagonist table?

It’s a cinematic example rather than a gaming one but one of my favourite bad guys is Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Much of this has to do with how Whitaker just looks like the cheeriest, happiest guy around. It’s difficult to imagine that such a jovial man could ever be evil and, for much of the film’s first half, I honestly doubted that such a man could ever be a baddie. Needless to say, I was in for a shock. As the film progresses, Amin flits from the enthusiastic old soldier we’ve almost grown to love to a bone-chilling monster, willing to slaughter hundreds of his countrymen and personally punish them so atrociously that it’s impossible not to feel sick watching the scenes in question. What differentiates Whitaker’s character from so many other tyrants is that because he emphasised the human qualities of Amin, showing the audience that he’s just as capable of joy and fear and anger as any other person, the audience is reminded that – for all his abominable acts – he was one of them. Just another human being. It sends the message that everyone is capable of evil as much as they are good better than any morality lecture and, despite Whitaker’s character ultimately being driven by power and madness, this lesson stuck with me and made me rank him as one of the best villains I’d ever seen.

So, then, how can such a villain be written? How does one escape the pitfalls of creating a genocidal maniac whose only goal is destroying the world to end his suffering? On the top of my head, I can think of two ways. The first is to go down the Amin and Barubary route of having a villain whose goal is the pursuit of power and who celebrates destruction while also emphasising virtues, or at least more positive emotions in them. Maybe there’s a specific group of henchmen that your bad guy has a soft spot for, or perhaps there’s a certain art form or cultural practice that they enjoy when they’re not slaughtering villages. Once you’ve given the signs that your baddie is as human as the rest of us, then you give them some depth. You’ve made them a human being. From there, one develops them and their actions as one would any character: by thinking about what they mean to your story and how they contribute to it, as well as how they react to success and failure.

The other way you can make a villain deeper than the usual videogame standard is to create what we tropers like to call a “Well-Intentioned Extremist”. A bad guy whose end is noble but whose means are morally questionable, perhaps completely unacceptable. It’s these villains that are my absolute favourites and it’s these villains that we’ll be covering in the next lecture.

Sam Rowett
Pywritechnics