This is a good follow-up to my previous post, What the Monsters in My Head Say About Me.
I’ve written my fair share of villains by now: demons and other monsters in Paranormal City, the shadowy figures pulling strings in Shuttlers, and the morally ambiguous and outright murky characters that noir insists on dragging into my other stories. Here’s what I’ve come to believe makes a villain actually work.
They Need a Reason, Even If It’s a Bad One
As I’ve mentioned before, a villain who’s simply evil for the sake of it rarely interests me, either as a reader or a writer; I don’t regard them as real characters, just caricatures used as puppets to make a point. There is a bestseller, the title of which I will not mention, in which every character, good or bad, is one of these caricatures, which is why I don’t like the book at all. As far as I am concerned, the author is pushing a set of political agendas and not writing to entertain the reader. I intended to use it as a comparable book for Paranormal City, but I dropped it because I couldn't get more than about a third of the way through.
Maybe I don't understand what it takes to be a best-selling author, but this definitely isn’t what I would want to do, as it is completely against my nature. To be honest, the book creeped me out!
The villains I’m proudest of always have a reason for what they do, a reason that makes a horrible kind of sense from their own perspective, even if it’s clearly indefensible from everyone else’s point of view. The Sidewise Directorate’s antagonists, for instance, are dangerous precisely because their logic isn’t entirely wrong, just taken somewhere monstrous. Theirs is essentially the ‘logic’ of tyranny and dictatorship, in which someone decides they know better than anyone else and that everyone must follow their rules. It completely ignores the diversity and variability of people everywhere, and the fact that different people want different things. It’s the reasoning behind communism and fascism alike, and why I hate them both.
They Shouldn’t Know They’re the Villain
Almost nobody sees themselves as the bad guy in their own story. The most effective villains I’ve both read and written are those who genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing, or at least the necessary thing, and would be offended to be called a villain. That self-belief makes them scarier than outright malice ever could.
For beings like this, revenge is a legitimate response to perceived wrongs, and violence is a preferred means of achieving it. The problem is that they rarely take responsibility for the harm they cause, believing themselves to be righteous.
A Little Humour Helps, Even Here
Given how dark humour and horror share a roof in my head, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of my villains get the odd genuinely funny line. It doesn’t undercut the threat; if anything, it makes them feel more human, more unpredictable, and harder to neatly categorise as simply monstrous.
They Need to Cost the Protagonist Something
Like monsters, the best villains, for me, aren’t measured by how powerful they are but by what they force the protagonist to give up to deal with them. A villain who can be defeated without real cost rarely feels like they mattered. The ones I’m proudest of leave a mark, win or lose.
I never plan my villains in advance, of course. Like everything else, I discover who they are as I write them. But looking back, these are the things I notice the good ones always seem to share.