 Drama: May 31, 2023 Issue [#11994] |
This week: Unusual Villains Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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How do you like your villains? Do you favour the traditional, or prefer something more unusual?
This week's Drama Newsletter is all about the Big Bad.
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Are you as tired of stereotypical villains as I am? The kind of villain who’s either amazingly beautiful or super ugly, with bad skin, and bad teeth, and absolutely zero redeeming qualities? I like my heroes to have depth. Character. People are more than just the one thing, and each of us has both good and bad inside of us. The same ought to go for villains. It may be a comforting notion that you can somehow tell if someone’s evil, because just look at them, but that’s not how the world works. Nor is it all that interesting.
That’s not to say that I’ve never enjoyed a story with a stereotypical villain. Lord Voldemort is pretty stereotypical after all – when we meet him he hardly looks human, and for all his power and all of his intelligence he somehow fails to understand the power of love, and friendship, and loyalty. His backstory is pretty interesting, but the Voldemort in Harry Potter’s time isn’t as frightening a character – in my opinion, of course – as Dolores Umbridge, with her overly-sweet kitten decorations and the way that she wielded the bureaucratic power of an increasingly corrupt Ministry of Magic. She feels more real, somehow. There are always those who will rise in the midst of chaos – people eager to tread on the rights of others, devoid of empathy and ready to commit the kind of deeds most people with intact morals would shy away from. History tells the tales of those Umbridges. I’m afraid that the future will contain many more.
George R. R. Martin knows how to write a good villain. His novels offer a variety of villain types, from the terrifying, no-doubt-about-it full-on evil characters like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton, to the scheming, manipulative Petyr Baelish, all the way to characters you wouldn’t readily class as a villain, or ones you’re not entirely sure about. Varys is such a character. For most of the story, it seems uncertain who he truly serves. And what about Tyrion Lannister? He is one of my favourite characters, but Martin calls him a villain. It is difficult for me to see TV series Tyrion in such a light – he schemes, yes, and commits some terrible deeds, but considering the life he’s led, who he’s surrounded by and the way things are in Westeros, I can understand why he does the things he does and, well, he doesn’t seem like a bad person as such. He can even be kind. Book Tyrion is heading down a darker path, and where he’ll end up we may never know. That depends on whether we’ll ever get to read the final books.
I love an unusual villain, though, and Terry Pratchett was a master of writing those. He managed, for example, to make music the villain in one novel (Soul Music), and it’s brilliant. Other villains include the Ankh-Morpork United football team, Holy Wood and the Auditors of Reality. As Pratchett often showed, to write a good villain you must first understand humanity. You have to know what makes people tick. Humanity is multifaceted. We’re capable of wisdom and great folly, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, compassion and pettiness. We’ll twitch curtains, vote against our own interest, yet when disaster strikes many will go out of their way to help those in need. Ankh-Morpork, one of the main settings of the Discworld novels, is ruled by a dictator called Lord Vetinari. He’s a highly intelligent man, a trained assassin, and he understands the people in his city-state well enough to know that what they want most of all is for everything to stay the same as they’ve always known it. His family motto is ‘Si non confectus, non reficiat’ – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’d say that’s pretty accurate.
It can be tempting to go down the traditional route when writing your villains. I admit, it can even be fun. I’ve written a stereotypical villain or two; sometimes I just want a proper Big Bad. There is a joy, though, in developing someone more complex, more layered, and these layers can open doors to new possibilities for your storyline. There’s something utterly satisfying about creating a unique, memorable character; someone who makes a lasting impression on your readers. Such a character is worth the extra effort. Who knows, they may even land you a bestseller. The world needs more original stories.
Happy writing!
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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