The Politically Correct Villain

[Wandering Author]

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think perhaps one reason the convention developed (although it was also embedded in the culture) was a sloppy attempt at symbolism.

On the other hand, if I recall correctly, Sauron was an interesting inversion of this – he was originally handsome, but his evil eventually disfigured him physically. Since it was plainly not implied everyone who was not physically perfect was evil, I had no problem at all with this. It was even interesting the way Tolkien stood the convention on its head – I wonder if this was deliberate or unconscious?

For me, the point isn’t political correctness, but paying attention to your story. I’ve actually read stories from the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries in which the hue of someone’s skin was used to symbolise their relation to evil (of course, pale skin indicated good, while the darker the skin, the more evil the character was) – and it was not only absurd, the entire story was sloppy and badly written. You can’t indulge that kind of “thinking” and then write a carefully thought out story. At least, I’ve never seen it done. (I read a translation of a Nazi propaganda story once, and apart from the fact the ideology made me want to gag, they laid that stuff on with such an overloaded trowel, the result was such a caricature I don’t see how anyone could bear to read it.)

Now, on the other hand, if you think about your story, and you have a good reason for your villain to be somehow disfigured, it won’t seem you’re appealing to the cheapest seats. (In my opinion, Richard III was hardly Shakespeare’s finest work, precisely because he relied on Tudor propaganda too heavily. But I will give him this – if he used the popular prejudice against the less than physically perfect, he didn’t lay it on with the trowel most lesser writers would have done.)

[atlantissong]

I think the perfect balance (for me at least) is where yes, the villian has a motivation. It could be a bad childhood, a wrong committed, a feeling of entitelment… whatever the story calls for. But I believe it should also be something, and shown properly, that the average person put in the same situation would not resort to anything anywhere near what this person has decided is totally acceptable. Yes, sometimes I enjoy a story where the bad guy is only a matter of perspective. I actually just read one where it covered all three sides of a war and what led each kingdom to do the things they were doing. No one was really right and no one was really wrong and it was handled wonderfully, but I think this is very hard to pull off. Most of the time I want to look at a villian and be able to hate/fear him (or her) on a very base level for what they are doing.

[Soren_Ringh]

It sounds like we all agree that to equate the disfigured with villainy is outlandish by our standards of today. I’m speaking generally here because in some parts of the world that falsehood still may hold true.

I’m very vague on shakespeare so somebody correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but wasn’t Richard III a protagonist in the play? This is just for my own curiosity.

We as writers, no matter how much we want the reader to sympathize with some aspects of our villains should make it clear that he or she has crossed the boundary of acceptable behavior. That is why they are the villain not the hero of the author’s story. In the end we should want the reader to see them fail.

[JuneDrexler]

In the play, Richard is the ‘main character’ but I would find it a stretch to call him the protagonist in any but the most generous terms. He is, at best, an anti-hero. I would say he is the main character and the villain.

–June

[Annika]

Soren and atlantissong understood perfectly what I meant and made great additions. I agree with atlantissong – a villain should have some sort of reason for his or her actions; the whole “born evil or enjoying being evil” thing is not usually very realistic and convincing. People may be born difficult and with character flaws, but not outright evil. But to be evil, as opposed to just victims or “flawed” people, the villains should react to those events in a different way from what most people would consider acceptable or justifiable.

[l_clausewitz]

JuneDrexler wrote:

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

It’s part of the reason why Tolkien felt so disappointed about not being able to publish the Silmarillion in his lifetime — there we see elves (and humans) behaving badly and essentially causing the ruin of the First Age (as well as the Downfall of Numenor). By the time of LotR’s third age these folks had suffered from the selection effect and we only get to see the (relatively virtuous) surviving minority.

[E_Finley]

JuneDrexler wrote:

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

I’ve always thought this as well. I even went so far as to make up and play through scenarios in my head about what if there were an orc that wasn’t evil? Would it not be evil to destroy it? … I never considered that this must mean that I disagree with the morality by race in lotr. Interesting.

edited to add:
I don’t remember if this is in the books, but at least in the movies it was mentioned that orcs are elves that have been turned evil. Still, I find it hard to believe that no good could be rekindled/reclaimed. Unless your criteria for good is perfection, which in the case of elves maybe it is.

[E_Finley]

Annika wrote:

– a villain should have some sort of reason for his or her actions; the whole “born evil or enjoying being evil” thing is not usually very realistic and convincing.

I prefer villains with reasons for what they do, however there are people who do things just because they think it is fun to manipulate others and make them suffer. Like you said, it would be more difficult to make that believable in a story.

[E_Finley]

I do not believe that people are born evil, but their choices can lead them down a progressively darker path until their actions would be judged as evil by others. The first example that comes to mind is Londo Mollari on the show Babylon 5. At first he makes a couple of decisions that don’t seem unreasonable. He tries to back out when things get darker, but finds that he can’t.
After you have enough blood on your hands, what’s a little more if it gets you what you wanted? And you must get what you wanted, to justify the guilt you’ve already incurred in pursuit of it. It’s good money after bad.

As for deformities and evil… I do not believe there is any correlation. As others have mentioned, bad treatment by others may cause someone with a physical deformity to develop coping mechanisms that lead to evil actions. Or it may just make them more sympathetic to others. Lots of people without physical deformities have done evil things as well, (school shootings).

My grandmother was, as far as I know, born missing a hand. She was adopted. I consider her a toxic person to be around… and crazy in a bad way, (she tried to kill her kids a couple of times). I think this is possibly due to how she was treated as a child, probably abandonment issues wondering if her mother gave her up because of her deformity. I know it is presumptuous of me to speculate, but I have at times wondered if the crazy is genetic. The only conclusion that I can work with is that it doesn’t matter, it is our actions that define us.

This topic is extremely interesting to me. A lot of my writing seems to focus on the question of whether evil tendencies are inherited and if so can they be overcome? I guess I have some issues?

[Annika]

That’s an interesting question. I’m quite certain that certain character traits that make it “easier” to become evil, like a tendency to be aggressive, can indeed be inherited. But you still have to act on it in a certain way, or you can choose to overcome those tendencies or, ideally, use them for good if possible.

[Soren_Ringh]

E_Finley wrote:

This topic is extremely interesting to me. A lot of my writing seems to focus on the question of whether evil tendencies are inherited and if so can they be orcome? I guess I have some issues?

We all have a shadow. Jung said it is a part of our consciousness. A base for our darkest fears and desires, and everybody has this little closet locked away somewhere. The thing is, the closet isn’t locked. Little bad vapors escape from it from time to time. We’ve all done something we were ashamed of after, or something we justified to our logical mind was the right thing to do when in fact we knew it was not.

The truly evil embrace the shadow, where as the rest of us wrestle with it in our day to day lives. That’s how I see it anyway. In literary works this wrestling match determines whether a character becomes a hero, or a villain archetype.

It’s hard for me to believe that there are people born without compassion. Maybe so, I could be wrong. To me, its far more likely that they had it stripped from them causing that little closet door to fly open like a Pandora’s box.

That’s my take.

[Annika]

I’m not sure – so please don’t be offended – but aren’t there certain disorders which at least make it much harder to feel empathy with others, like sociopathy? Of course, it’s hard to say if a sociopath could be considered evil even if they act evil since obviously they have a disorder which isn’t their fault…

[Soren_Ringh]

Is the sociopath born a sociopath? I don’t know. Or did he or she develop those traits. We all aren’t born the same. Our individual gifts and weaknesses cross all over the spectrum. So if I believe that, then I have to believe some can be influenced to do evil where others would have a greater resistance.

If there are those born without compassion then they are the deformed villains of this thread. I hope that isn’t the case.

I’m not offended. It’s an interesting discussion. In my previous post I was speaking generally.

[Weird Jim]

I watched a TV show Saturday where the murderer was the nice guy. ‘Everybody loves XXXXX. (Name ommitted so as not to hurt feelings. There’s at least one member here with the name used.) It was a rerun and although I had vague memories of the show, most of it had gone. The villain was bland and boring.

To throw watchers off several of the characters were portrayed with traits alloted to traditional villains. The scruffy, not too good looking, guy with a speech impediment. The burly guy living with his parents and being bullied by them. The Peeping Tom landlord, and the ex-policeman married to the ex-escort agency owner he met while working.

As I said, the villain is boring, and the writers wrote expecting watchers to pick a traditional villain. Are the near traditional ones what the audiences want?

[Wandering Author]

A few more thoughts on the use of villains in fiction. First of all, without attempting to take sides on who is and is not responsible for their actions, I’m not sure this matters. Of course, your depiction of the villain will be shaped by your own opinions, and may gain or lose you readers – but that’s one of those personal choices every writer has to make. The important thing is this: whether you choose to depict a villain who is evil just because they like to be, one who can’t help it, or even if you portray them in a way which leaves that choice up to the reader, your villain should be someone the reader does not want to see succeed. Let’s take an extreme example – a character with the “goal” of pulling off the largest school shooting in history. I think every reader would want to see the hero stop this plan from being carried out – and that’s what you need in a villain.

Of course, some choices can lead to complications. Take Dexter (I do know he’s the hero of the series – bear with me), the serial killer who only hunts other serial killers. (I’m not a fan, but I read one book, just to see if the author could pull it off.) Now, the author was convincing enough I felt at least some sympathy for Dexter (there are definite limits to the sympathy I’m going to feel for anyone who enjoys killing; I prefer my heroes, if they are killers at all, to do so reluctantly, because there is no other choice) and I can’t say I found myself mourning Dexter’s victims. But I still found the impact of the book oddly muted, and after a little thought, I understood why. If I view Dexter as a murderous monster, then I’m not going to want to read about him – but, if I decide he can’t help the way he is and feel sympathy for him, then I’ve got to wonder about the other serial killers he’s going after. What about them? Perhaps they can’t help it, either, and should be captured and held as humanely as possible instead of dying.

So, at least for me, the force of the book was muted by that issue. If they deserved to die, then why not Dexter? (Yes, I do understand the people he kills can hardly be considered innocent victims – except that, if he is, then they may be, too.) Now, if you took the same story, and wrote it in such a manner that a regular police officer pursued those same villains, and wound up shooting them because there was no other choice, I’d be fine with that. (And even if you presented the villains as mentally ill, with no choice at all over their own actions, I’d still be fine with it – because the police officer didn’t set out to murder them. And their actions did demand some response; if shooting them was the only way to stop them, then that happens to be the best possible outcome in that situation.)

Note that I am not arguing you shouldn’t write, or read, such an ambiguous story if that’s what you want. I’m discussing what works for me. Every single choice you make is going to work for some readers and scare others off. The trick, as a writer, is to at least understand what you’re doing.

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