#in part because they’re less common in the general population and considered weird and deviant on some level

[thebluestbluewords]

I’ve had the stupidest omegaverse idea and it’s bringing me so much joy to write fictional inheritance law as it applies to the extended Cinderella family in my incredibly silly omegaverse universe. It’s also providing the precedent that I needed to establish in order to make some of my convoluted political marriage ideas work, so I am feeling very accomplished in my daydream universe today

[avelera]

What would you say makes a villain/antagonist a compelling one? Would it be their effect on the character(s)' development? Their effect on the overall plot? Both? Or is it something else entirely? Your thoughts on writing are always so interesting (and insightful) so I thought I'd ask you.

Once I would have said this: villains take action. I wrote extensively on this topic in one post about Character Agency, but in essence I said there that in a huge percentage of stories the villain is the person who sets the story into motion by doing a Bad Thing. The heroes are then stuck in the relatively passive role of Fixing the Bad Thing so that the world can go Back to Normal. Which, if mishandled, can make for rather boring protagonists. 

The villain is often allowed to swan around, chew the scenery, put together dastardly plans, and rub their hands together gleefully as their plan comes to fruition. The hero in this scenario… basically gets to look up at the sky in horror at the latest explosion, and then run around putting out brushfires. I certainly know who I would rather be in that scenario! The villain is having way more fun while the hero has to Be Responsible and do the ugly, boring, tedious, not-fun stuff of halting someone else’s ambition. The villain gets to wax poetic about WHY they are acting in this DEVIANT manner, while the hero basically has to stick with the milquetoast Generally Acceptable Morality for the Widest Possible Audience which is stuff like “killing is bad” and “don’t do the thing that is bad” and “don’t rock the boat.”

And the thing is, it’s very common that villains are written to include Sympathetic Motivations so often the villain’s reasoning can sound pretty reasonable! It’s “just their methods which are wrong!” For example, Magneto wants mutant equality, as does Charles Xavier. The narrative though, tends to agree that Magneto goes about getting it The Wrong Way.  

But we very rarely see the hero taking these actions The Right Way, we just see them stopping the villain from doing things The Wrong Way. Since the villain is the only one we see Taking The Action, it can kinda make the hero look like a contrarian and a stick-in-the-mud. After all THEY were just in a holding pattern keeping a rather shitty world the way it is, they weren’t taking active action to improve it, and rarely does the narrative show the world becoming a legitimately better place through their methods, it’s just shown Going Back to Normal because of the hero’s actions. 

Back to the X-Men example, Charles Xavier* (*in the live action films) never DOES anything dramatic to ensure mutant equality except hide out, maintain the status quo, and stop Magneto from expediting the process in his way. Because of the PG-13 rating we rarely even get a sense that anyone got widely hurt by the villain’s actions. There’s no blood, and just some distant screaming, which is hard to relate to compared to, say, the discrimination named characters face in the X-Men franchise, discrimination Magneto is trying to stop. In essence, Xavier insists on getting equality the Right Way but never seems to actually take action on a scale to ensure it. This creates a great deal of sympathy for Magneto for all but, say, the last 10 minutes when the script demands that he goes batshit crazy and starts wreaking destruction as a way of undermining his previous ideas.

So to answer your first question: villains get to have more fun, be more active, and often attempts to make them sympathetic are so effective and the counter-argument so unenforced that they really come across as a more active, motivated hero. That’s the simple answer, but in my mind it reveals a bigger issue with villains:

This issue has been growing in my mind lately and is a bit less flippant and a bit less comic-book-villain-based as an answer to your question. Namely:

Villains are allowed to be different.

And the problem there is: most people are different. 

Whether it’s on the inside or the outside, most people feel themselves to be different from everyone else in some way. However, in lazy writing, protagonists are often given very boring, milquetoast, mainstream characteristics. 

The villain gets to be different. Most people feel different in some way. Most people, therefore, at some point identify more closely with the villain.

Take, for example, being queer. For a very long time, I’d say it’s not actually over yet so let’s say to this day, most queer characters or queer-coded characters are villains or antiheroes. Look at just about every Disney Villain. But it’s more insidious than that. 

Have you ever noticed the shows where a protagonist is allowed to be queer? Black Sails springs to mind as being rich in queer characters. But here’s the thing, many of them are anti-heroes. They are literally pirates, who are traditionally Bad Guys. They live in “morally complicated times” and are part of a huge cast which also includes lots of straight characters. Shows about Ancient Rome spring to mind as well for allowing “good guy queers” BUT they too often do Bad Guys things due to their “morally complicated” setting – ie, they’re often thieves, murderers, etc but they also might have a “heart of gold” under all there and they’re allowed to be good guys and queer because they’re already outside mainstream values. 

Irene Adler is “morally complicated” and an antagonist if not an outright villainess in BBC’s Sherlock - she’s a dominatrix and works with Moriarty, even if she comes to regret it. “Deep historical dramas” that take place so long ago they’re practically fantasy are allowed to have some queer characters, if they have a huge ensemble cast that is majority straight because “those were different times”.  Stories that take place in prisons, like Orange is the New Black or Oz, technically are set in a place populated by traditional “bad guys”, ie they take place in a jail and are therefore “complicated”. Again, they also have huge casts. Hannibal - morally complicated, you’re not always sure if the good guys are really good or if they’re falling to darkness themselves are could be considered anti-heroes. Lucifer from the show “Lucifier” is literally the Devil. They’re are all outside the mainstream already so even if they’re “good guys” they have traditionally villainous traits of some kind allowing them to show these “deviant” characteristics while also being “good”. 

While there’s been improvement recently in the media, the point is: there’s very few cases of characters with non-straight sexuality who are unabashed protagonists in a show that is not about the “bad guys” or isn’t otherwise “morally complex” and riddled with atypical heroes and anti-heroes. 

Many times, when a writer wants to put a more morally complicated or otherwise “deviant” character into a mainstream story, they have to make them a villain or anti-hero. These characters are allowed to decry the status quo. They’re allowed to be interested in the same sex, they’re allowed to be poly, they’re allowed to express their sexuality in an unabashed way. 

This also applies to neurodiverse or neuroatypical characters. How many unabashed protagonists in morally uncomplicated shows are there out there? Troubled genius shows are quite popular, but almost across the board these characters like Sherlock and House  are introduced as anti-heroes, borderline villains compared to more typical heroes who are Nice Guys and Gals. “Legion” springs to mind as a neuroatypical protagonist but he also has traditionally villainess tendencies and behaves outside the mainstream. He is not an unabashed protagonist. Quite frankly the vast majority of neuroatypical characters in fiction are villains in horror franchises, with maybe the exception of PTSD which is portrayed sympathetically, even if rarely I’ve seen a character who begins the story with PTSD who is also an unquestionable protagonist (ex. The Punisher), rather it usually comes up in the course of their story and is dealt with as a consequence (ex. Frodo Baggins, Tony Stark, etc). 

Let’s look at the number of characters that are alcoholics and also unabashed good guys. Or we could look at the number of characters that are drug users or addicts and are unabashed good guys in morally uncomplicated stories. Let’s look at the number of protagonists that unflinchingly enjoy sex and are unabashed good guys. 

Look at the number of people who feel alone, depressed, anxious, weird-looking or otherwise like an outcast and see how many of them are unabashed good guys. Yeah, the protagonist can sometimes “feel like an outsider” but then the villain is often someone who also feels like an outsider, but unlike the hero they still do. OR if the villain is someone popular, by the end the hero has flipped the tables so that they’re the ones surrounded by loving friends, who has gained social acceptance, and the villain is now isolated, or scarred, or strange looking, or has a breakdown. 

So to this day, if you felt different at all, isolated or queer or strange looking or neurodivergent, addicted, unpopular, or hard to deal with, the villain was the only person in widespread mainstream storytelling who was like you. 

Look at Loki - he feels rejected by his family, he feels alone, he’s adopted and feels he was given less love as a result. Thor never expresses those feelings. Even as he becomes less of an asshole over the course of the first movie, it’s more that he lost his traits of being a popular bully to become merely well-loved and popular. Frankly, Loki is something of a protagonist for kicking that process off and making Thor a better person. Loki is the one who gets to express moments of vulnerability and anguish that come from inside of him, Thor’s lowest moment is that he gets rejected by his favorite weapon. It’s not hard to understand why many people felt closer to Loki than to Thor - most people’s sense of misery and isolation comes from chronic events in their life - friends, family, their appearance, their mental state, the things they love, whereas it’s hard to identify with Thor’s single moment of sadness in the real world, yet he’s the protagonist of the story that is set up as its moral center.

Also in such a story, the villain’s final explosion can feel forced, like in the above example of Magneto. Why did Loki suddenly go off the rails? He seemed very intelligent and rational before he suddenly decided that the only way to gain love and acceptance was genocide. It feels manufactured by the writer to give an excuse for a big fight at the end. Also, again, the necessities of PG-13 mean we don’t really see the blood and gore and human suffering - so Loki’s actions really feel like something many of us have longed to do: lash out at those who have hurt us and made us feel unworthy for years on end. Thor is an unworthy avatar of real world feelings of hurt. Most people in the world feel more like Loki at some point in their lives than they feel like favored-child Thor. 

But only villains in that instance were allowed to show even that level of anger at the circumstances that made them different from everyone else. 

Here’s where I start to get scared - because villains are the only ones allowed to be at all deviant, at all at odds with the status quo, at all angry at their circumstances. They’re the only ones allowed to be queer, megalomaniacal, to say what they’re thinking which is a big FUCK YOU to the world. 

Now you combine them with traditional villains throughout history, in order to drive home that they’re the bad guys and set up your plot. 

You combine them with Nazi ideology to drive home the point that these are unequivocally Bad Dudes that the hero can kill en masse. You combine them with genocidal ideology. You combine them with massive armies and gold statues and the iconography of every villain throughout history. Because you need to show they’re bad guys.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Now you have this problem where the villain is allowed to be different--to express ideas that the traditional protagonist cannot because they must be defenders of the Mainstream--BUT you’ve this villain to people who maybe don’t understand why they feel connected to those people, and maybe don’t distinguish between the actions the villain takes as a result of feeling that way. After a while maybe that audience can’t help but notice that the only people they identify with tend to be the bad guys. 

To me, this seems to be the obvious root of the very troubling movement I’ve seen within the geek community of sympathy towards the “Alt Right” and other such fascist movements. When only villains are allowed to be different, but they’re also shown to be horrible, it means people’s walls of sympathy begin to be broken down towards horrible people. I don’t want to clutch my pearls here, I don’t want to say what writers can and can’t write. But if bad guys are allowed to be different, and bad guys are cool and hey, bad guys often show parallels with, for example, Nazis, maybe it’s cool to be a Nazi or have Nazi-adjacent traits or iconography because that’s the only place where anyone like me has ever been shown. It might be Nazis, or it might be criminals, it might be murderers or thieves or pirates. But that’s the only place where people are scarred or rejected or crazy or giving a big middle finger to the world seem to reside. And the heroes are boring, and they’re not like me.

My solution though would be this: allow more unabashed neurodivergent, queer, vulnerable, hurting, active, scared, enraged protagonists. Don’t let villains be the only ones who are allowed any kind of authenticity because they’re the only ones allowed to break from the ideals of the mainstream. Don’t let villains be the only ones who get to set the events of the story into motion. Let the protagonist start something BIG, let the villain set out to stop them. Let the protagonist be an oddball and not just in a quirky fun way. Let the protagonist be as interesting and tortured and angry as the traditional antagonist.

I know this last part isn’t answering your question, and I don’t have a solution to it, but this seemed as good a time as any to get it off my chest. I hope the rest was valuable to you at least a little!