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This article says that at one time villains were depicted as ugly people whose minds had been twisted by their deformities. This has apparently changed, although I can’t see giving a villain a pleasant personality. It mentions Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Does deformity affect personality? Was the depiction of evil correct when they were made evil? How does the reader expect you to show villains today?
This is a great read. I agree with their statement that what we want now is sympathetic ugliness- because none of us are perfect, and we are able to identify with the slights suffered by other imperfect characters. In terms of the bad guy, I absolutely adore a villain with a motive. No one exists in a vaccuume. No one is born thinking- you know, I think I’ll be evil! Even the criminally insane people who commit horrendous acts were innocent little babies once. The article makes a good point about the king’s era in that they were horrific, violent, and ignorant times- our environment shapes who we are. If we grow up knowing nothing of love and compassion and gentleness, well then…how do we know what those are?
One example I use for this discussion ( cause I love to talk villains
Nerd alert :whistle: Have you ever watched (or read, I suppose) Hellboy 2? I actually wanted the ” bad guy” to win. The elves and magical creatures are being destroyed by humans in their ignorance and complete lack of regard for other creatures. Sure, if they win we all die… but hey- pointy eared dude has a real good point! I’d be killing some humans too if I was him.Thanks for sharing :silly:
While I can understand the thought process behind deformities = villian (consider a kid with anything outside the norm in a large gathering of peers. Do they get peace? or do they get attacked and beat down for their difference?), I think we’ve gone too far to the other extreme.
YES! Villians are normal people who have a conflicting motive with society. (Love HB 2, btw. The CGI alone made it worth watching. Though the whole persecution thing was overdone by that point.) However, the consideration that evil can not exist for the sake of just being evil doesn’t jive with me.
I think because I believe everything in life is a slider with things falling somewhere within the extremes. Because I believe that, I also believe the bell curve exists in real life. If you have someone who is holy enough to rival God, you’re going to have someone evil enough to rival the worst demon known. Balance must exist… and I think some of the modern villany has lost that balance.
M Knight Shamalyan(I know I spelled that one wrong)tried to examine that “balanced approach” in the movie Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis. It was a unique take, but definitely not what people wanted to hear…
Sorry. I’ll stop ranting now.
I remember 2 or 3 years ago, an actor passed away who had always played wild-eyed villains in Hollywood Westerns in the 50s and 60s (I wish I could remember his name). And he had said in an interview before he died that the villains he always played were written in the scripts as evil for evil’s sake, or evil for the fun of it, or they were just plain mean. There was no backstory, no unhappy childhoods, no fallen from grace narrative. THey were just plain mean bullies. And those were his favorite villains to play. But as the 60s rolled around, the villains all started being given stories that explained they weren’t bad people, just doing bad things, and he hated it. They were no fun to play anymore.
But yeah, it used to be that bad guys in fiction were just bad guys. I personally think there’s 2 types of villains. The “Sauron” type, where it’s just a stand in for personified evil, and the “everyone is the hero of their own story”, and it’s just that their goals and dreams are diametrically opposed to those of the protagonist. The 2nd type are far more realistic, but the 1st type are more fun to write in terms of diabolical evil.
My rambling $0.02.
No worries,
MattVillains and deformities are largely a cultural thing I believe. Maybe it all started at the birthplace of western civilization, ancient Greece. Human perfection to rival the gods is evident by their statues. Deformities, at least to a spartan, made one unworthy.
In medieval Europe deformities and mental disabilities were the devil’s work in many cases. This was not always the case however. Maybe it goes back to when civilations were nomadic gatherers where practically every day was an act of survival. How would physical deformity have been looked at then? If one were shunned, how did you survive? From what I gather, most African lions classified as maneaters were forced to hunt man out of a necessity to survive because of some physical handicap. Could that be the origin? I doubt we’ll ever know. It’s a subject with no clear cut answers.
As far as sympathetic/unsympathetic villains go, that may be just a matter of personal taste and what fits best for the story. Sometimes the story is best served by a less than pure evil villain. Other times, a pure evil menace is just what is needed.
The menace of pure evil is frightening and grabs the reader, but so doesn’t the more human villain who makes the reader ask themselves the tough questions. Sometimes we can have both.
I argue that regardless of what society feels at the moment, we should follow where the story leads us. I dislike the requirement that villains be physically perfect as much as the notion that heroes must be. I don’t believe that good or evil is intimately connected to a physical handicap (or physical perfection), so if a hero can have a deformity, I vote that a villain can as well.
That said, I think there is an older view (the one from the old Richard III days)that is pretty much impossible to sell today. That is the notion that the physical deformity is an indication of evil. Unless it’s some trait of magic — doing evil magic deforms you — the moral state of a character and their physical soundness are not bound together.
Of course, much as I love LotR one of the things I always hated about it is the notion that elves are always good and orcs always evil. If I’d done LotR fan fic I would have wanted to write about a moral orc or an evil elf, just because I can’t suspend belief to an entire race being morally right or wrong.
–June
JuneDrexler wrote:I argue that regardless of what society feels at the moment, we should follow where the story leads us.–June
Could you explain this further? It reads as if your saying that how a society feels at a given moment should have more influence than the story itself.
All I said was to pick the villain that works the best for our story. I began my post with some historical observations then wrote about the differences in using a pure evil villain vs using a more human one. I made no comment about whether to go along with cultural beliefs vs The Story although I have my opinion. Cultural beliefs have influenced what is seen as evil countless times in the past. The Salem witch trials, or The Inquisition. Look at how Hitler justified his treatment of the Jews. Sometimes this has been a physical difference, sometimes cultural. Historically, when we want people to become afraid we create others as the threat. We conjure up evil only to find it is us.
Selling a person with a deformity as evil would all depend on the characters perception of himself and society. Maybe there is scientific evidence of someone being born evil, I’d like to think not, but I can’t say with any certainty. But lets say that people aren’t born evil. Then where does the evil come from? A person’s choices? What if a deformed individual blamed someone or society in general for their condition, or how they’ve been treated, and took retribution. I don’t believe it would be a hard sell. It could also go the other way like a hunchback of Notre Dame.
Could it be that sometimes the deformity of the villain is symbolic of what he is, different and twisted on the inside?
Quite the opposite actually. I think sometimes writers worry too much about how society thinks at the moment. The story should win.
I wasn’t disagreeing with your post, actually. I was merely referring to another aspect of the topic — and somewhat to the title of ‘politically correct villain’. There are people who would argue that one can’t have a deformed villain because you can’t say a deformed person is evil, or really that any disadvantaged group could be represented by an evil character (Not saying anyone here said this, but it is ‘out there’ in the world as it were).
Sorry if you took this as a slam on your comments.
–June
First, a disclaimer. This hits close to home. I am legally blind – and my eyes are crossed. I have had people say to me in the past that this was a visible symbol of the fact I was somehow “deformed” in mind and or spirit as well. So I won’t pretend to be able to view the whole topic very objectively. (I’m not about to flame, by the way, although I won’t deny it wouldn’t be too hard on this topic. But it is a legitimate one to discuss. I just feel I need to confess upfront that it isn’t something I can feel detached about.)
However… on one hand, as sensitive as I can be on this topic, I would not automatically be offended if a villain had some physical or mental abnormality – as long as the writer didn’t take the cheap road and explain that character’s villainy as simply the inward expression of their outward “wrongness”. Being born other than normal is neither a guarantee the person will turn out bad or good.
But, as I say, if the explanation was simply that the villain was “born defective” (a phrase once tossed at me) or any equivalent of that, I’d throw the book across the room, remember the author’s name, and never so much as crack the cover of anything else they wrote. (Unless it was an obvious parody, of course.) Because anyone who can’t do better than that isn’t worth wasting my time on.
Now, as to the idea all that persecution can send a person on the path to villainy… I certainly suspect it is possible. I’m sure there are people who do develop a thirst for revenge after enough bullying. On the other hand, in my personal experience, I know what it’s like to be a victim. The last thing I want to do is be a bully. (I’m not claiming I’m perfect, but when I catch myself at anything I consider nasty, it makes me sick inside.) I hate the idea of suffering. When anger rises up inside me, I tend to bottle it up or turn it inward. Not perfect, I know, but I prefer that to hurting others. So the same experience can impact two people (characters) in different ways. In the end, I think that’s the most valuable lesson for us as writers. It isn’t just the background, but what you do with it.
Two things.
Anybody remember the TV series, The Fugitive and the implication that the real murderer was a one armed man and how could anyone believe the whole and wholesome doctor could hve murdered his wife. Impossible. I remember thinking about the one armed man being tagged with the murder without any other proof. He had only one arm. How could he not be a murderer? I can’t remember the details of the murder, but I seem to remember wondering how he could have managed it with just one arm.
I had a job at one time in Litho Prep – preparing film for making offset printing plates. One of the jobs that came in was from the RCM Police of their criminals at large. Those being watched and evidence gathered. Everything was top secret. I needed clearance. There was one photo of a youngish man dressed in clean jeans, jacket and pants. Medium height,well groomed with a good hair cut. Any young woman would have had no problem, based on looks, in taking him home to meet the parents. What was his criminal designation. Contract Killer. Certaily not like any of the contract kilers you’d see on TV.
JuneDrexler wrote:Sorry if you took this as a slam on your comments.–June
Nothing of the kind. This is a discussion and I want to hear what people have to say. I thought that maybe I should have defined the two topics better in my first post. I took nothing you wrote as a slam. I just wasn’t sure what you were disagreeing with. I don’t take a difference of opinion so personally so feel free to disagree. I do.
I think we are pretty much in agreement, actually. I too think that born with a deformity = evil is pretty much impossible to sell (to me at least). A villain with a deformity would be just that, a bad guy who just happened to have some physical challenge. Could that challenge have contributed to his attitude? In the ways you describe, sure. Or it could simply be an aspect of his life that’s apart from his ‘evil’.
When looking at the notion of ‘born bad’, I have a hard time with it. I don’t quite buy it because, to me, evil isn’t something a person is but rather something they do. The character’s life might help explain his/her choices to do evil, or it might not, but whichever way it goes evil is a choice the character made.
Example: two different people commit similar murders — they bash in some victim’s head with a rock. One man does this because he hears voices and thought the victim was a danger, or maybe he was desperate for the $5 the guy had in his pocket because his kids are starving. The other guy just happened to have a rock in his hand and thought, “What the heck, I’m going to kill someone.”
Now, both acts are evil — murder is wrong. But people could argue that the first man is less evil because his reasons are either understandable or his mental state is in question or whatever. But, in either case, regardless of the motivation or lack, if either fellow had merely thought about murdering the man and then dropped the rock and walked away we would not call him ‘evil’.
What I mean in this example is that the evil is in the outward expression of the thoughts. As such it is a choice. People can’t be born with a choice pre-made for them, they have to actually, you know, make the choice. At least that’s my take on it.
Straying fairly far from the disabled villain thing with this, but it is an interesting discussion.
–June
Yes it is interesting. The reasons you’ve mentioned about one’s choices is I think the more modern villain has become so widely used. Times change and so does what the general publics expectations on who and what a villain is. The same with heroes I think as well. The devil-may care swashbuckler who laughs in the face of death or the gallant knight who has no fear has been replaced by Everyman or everywoman heroes. As with the villains, we want our heroes to be something we can identify with.
Not that these older villains and heroes can’t be used. But I think it will become harder as the years go on. Audiences are becoming more sophisticated. I’m speaking from a writers viewpoint here, there are those who prefer the older style villains and heroes. Such is your right.
I am speaking human heroes and villains. Inhuman villains like Sauron are still popular. I imagine the same for heroes but for the life of me I can’t think of one at this moment.
So yes, a villain disfigured and deformed can be used but their evil has to grow from something. The deformity didn’t naturally make them evil. Something within themselves chose that path, although they wouldn’t see their choices as evil.
Personally, I sometimes think that characters, particularly heroes, have become a bit too ordinary. Now, that’s of course personal taste, but I sometimes prefer epic stories and escapism. Of course, the hero/heroine should still be relatable, but I want them to be someone I can look up to or someone who makes me fantasize what it would be like to be like them… Also, if the “ordinary guy/girl” thing is overdone, I think it can sometimes come across as whiny.
Similar with villains, really… I want to be able to dislike an antagonist, which doesn’t really work if I’m permanently sorry for their hard childhood or something.
No offense intended to anyone, of course. As I said, this is just an attempt to describe my personal taste. Also, I’m not advocating going back to the deformities -> evil thing; not in the least. I agree with everyone here who said that this makes no sense and can in fact be offensive to people with disabilities or people who happen to look different. But the side aspect of the topic Soren mentioned, i. e. heroes and villains becoming more “average” in their character and skills, is highly fascinating and I therefore wanted to add my totally subjective opinion.
It seems I have overlooked a third type of hero/antagonist. Your post brings up a valid point Annika. I’ll for the sake of simplicity call them the supernaturals.
Your right, these are great stories. The Marvel Comic movie heroes and villains would fall under this category. So wouldn’t Star Wars. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and Way of Kings. Ender of Ender’s Game, and the current crop of vampire and werewolf stories. There are tons more of course.
Yes, these characters are great. Both hero’s and villains. They are like the Greek pantheon in a way in that they have human emotions and traits to go with supernatural powers. To make a reference back to the original topic, look at the Star Wars characters. Spoiler alert for anyone not familiar with the story.
Luke Skywalker is a farmboy with a latent ability to use a supernatural energy called “The Force”. He goes from hesitant and whiny farmboy to becoming a supernatural warrior.
Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father has a meteoric rise from being a child slave to becoming a very powerful Jedi. His emotions betray him and the Jedi Order. In a mythical lightsabre battle over a fiery lake, Anakin is defeated by his once friend and master Obi-wan Kenobi. Anakin survives but is horribly scarred and crippled. He becomes a half-man, half machine. Tragically, the young boy once described as a chosen one has destroyed everything he has loved and has become a part of the cold and indifference of The System.
The Emperor. A Sith Lord. He becomes horribly scarred when his dark power is deflected back towards him.
This all still has a human quality to it, just on an epic scale with characters with supernatural abilities. Great stuff.
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