Samven's Writing Lectures

[Samven]

3. Writing the Villain

Part Two - The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

World War I is, without doubt, one of my favourite wars. Well, okay, let me reiterate that. Saying that you have a “favourite” war is a bit like saying you have a most preferred way to have your toenails yanked off – but I digress. Perhaps I should instead say that I find it one of the most interesting wars because it wasn’t really about good and evil. At the end of the day it was some old men arguing over how much land they owned and where they should be allowed to expand their perceived territorial rights that caused all the world to descend into conflict. Yet that’s precisely what interests me so much about it. When the fighting stopped, everyone on both sides rejoiced. From what I read, a lot of the German soldiers didn’t even care that they’d lost. They’d fought the good fight and everyone had played their part and even though what was lost would never be returned at least everyone knew that there’d be peace. Or, at least, they hoped.

What eventually narked Germany off wasn’t simply the fact that they’d lost but the fact that they ended up being made to bare responsibility for the war. Try to see this from the German perspective. The Allies were trying to cut through their lands, mowing down their soldiers… This was not the Second World War, where even Hitler’s own officers began realising that he was a complete monster; it was far more morally grey than that. To the Germans, the Allies were the invaders. Germany was only protecting her realm and her soldiers fought long and hard for four long and painful years. So, you can imagine how miffed everyone got when the Allies waltzed in, slapped Germany with the war debt, called them the villains and swaggered out of the discussions wearing the 20th Century equivalent of trollfaces. Now, you may be wondering, “What does any of this have to do with storytelling? About writing villains?” Everything.

You see, the stories that stick with me are the ones where the enemy is just as justified in their actions as the heroes, or are trying to achieve a noble end but have very twisted means. I’ve already talked about how it’s possible to write a self-serving, truly evil bad guy while still making interesting but the kind of antagonists who resonate most strongly with me are the ones who aren’t that different from the heroes. So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at a few. Those of us who owned a Gameboy Advance may remember a special little title called Golden Sun, which revolved around a band of youths from a hidden town of alchemists trying to stop a group of thieves from destroying the world with the magical artefacts that they’d stolen.

Except that wasn’t quite true.

The second game reveals that the thieves you killed were actually sent on behalf of a town called Prox, whose people discovered that the world was quite literally falling to pieces because the magical energy that sustained it had been locked away and that, in order to reverse the decay, they needed to restore said magic into the world. Unfortunately, the guardians of this power laughed them out; prompting them to attack in the first place. So, yeah. Turns out you weren’t quite the hero you thought you were. In fact, by killing them you more or less doomed a whole community to certain death because you didn’t even try to ask them about their side of the story. Whoops!

Of course, it’s not just the Japanese who employed this kind of enemy. Anyone who’s played TimeSplitters might remember the antagonist of Future Perfect: a scientist named Crow. Now, while TimeSplitters wouldn’t know how to take itself seriously if it tried, Crow was still a surprisingly interesting villain. Quite simply, he wanted to live forever and he wanted to help humanity as a whole escape the inevitability of death. Unfortunately, the only ways to do this were to either a) raise the dead as zombies through mad science, or b) turn himself and his test subjects into genetic mutants with the ability to manipulate time and space: mutants that would later devolve into the hideous creatures for which the series is named. Huh.

These kinds of villain are actually closer to the mould of heroes, or at least human beings, as far as their intentions go: which is why they’re so interesting. They represent what the heroes could be if they had fewer moral guidelines, or if they allowed their noble goal to consume their humanity. As such, when it comes to writing such characters, I find it helps to write them in a similar way as I would a protagonist because such villains aren’t guffawing genocide-generators on top of a big evil tower. They’re people and, as such, they need their writers to really think about who they are, what has made them so dedicated to “fixing” the world in their incredibly messed-up and who are they connected to as much as you would with a hero. A villain the hero – that the audience – can connect with and form a strange sort of bond with also makes the inevitable showdown all the worse, because we want to save them from themselves but we also know that it’s just not possible to do so.

It should be pointed out, however, that this doesn’t mean your villain has to be sympathetic. Feeling sorry for someone is not the same as empathising with them. Let me annotate another example to elaborate. In the first Mass Effect game, the villain is an alien named Saren. Like the protagonist, Commander Shepard, Saren is part of an intergalactic organisation of peacekeepers known as SPECTRES. Yet, while he’s dedicated to the cause of keeping order in the known galaxy, he’s also incredibly malicious and arrogant. He’s also got a burning resentment of humanity, due to having lost family in a war with them before the story’s events. From the very beginning, comparisons can be drawn with Shepard; who can, if the player so chooses, be the sole survivor of a terrible battle or have watched their whole family be murdered by alien slavers as a child. That similarity, however, isn’t what makes it tough to kill Saren. What makes it tough to deliver the final blow is learning that all his wicked acts were done to forge an alliance with the Reapers: a race of ancient machines who intend to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy for reasons incomprehensible to any but their own kind… and they have very persuasive methods of recruiting others to their cause. At the end of the day, Saren and Shepard are both trying to save the galaxy and both see the other’s plan as being flawed. Shepard wants to fight while Saren (misguidedly) believes that the Reapers can be reasoned with and that living as slaves to their every whim is better than not living at all. His plan doesn’t work – at all – but the fact that he was willing to try it opens up all sort of moral debate. Was he a coward for trying to get on the good side of the Reapers or did he genuinely believe that he could protect the galaxy? Saren raises questions; questions that few other villains do. Killing him isn’t difficult because he’s a sympathetic character. It’s difficult because he’s a pathetic one. It’s honestly hard to watch him descend from a confident opponent to a desperate pawn blinded by his own idealism.

In any case, however, once you’ve developed such a villain the one thing that you should never, ever, ever, ever, EVER do is betray them by killing them off in an inglorious fashion. Final Fantasy IX, despite my complaint with the series, has an incredibly good villain in Garland. This man is the last of his kind, a being from a dying world that he is desperately trying to revive. Unfortunately, the only way he can restore life to his planet is by consuming the souls of beings living on other worlds: specifically, yours. Since fighting him means the end of his world, there’s really no difference between him and the hero Zidane. Both of them want to protect their world and are willing to sacrifice another to do it. It means that neither side can really claim the moral high-ground and introduces an unexpected greyness into the moral spectrum. Unfortunately, he was too good to last and suffer the fate of having his “Ultimate Villain” status stolen away by a gender-confused monkey throwing a suicidal temper-tantrum that will blow up the world.

I wish I was joking.

Sam Rowett
Pywritechnics