Now you know me, I view blog posts like cheese. I like to let them age for a bit, get nice and ripe and then take a bite into them and get food poisoning and then puke in front of my in-laws all over my wife’s ailing grandmother and that’s why she divorced me.
So I can understand your shock in seeing a blog post so soon after the last one. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to overwhelm you. If I were going to do that, I would use one of my many doomsday devices for the purpose.
Rather, this is just to address something I was chatting up with my good friend, Robert J. Bennet, author of Mr. Shivers (which you should totally check out if you like darker elements of magical realism and/or hobos on trains). To give a post of the twitter transcript would be a huge pain in the anus, and my anus can bear no more pain, earthly or spiritual, but he made a pretty solid blog post about it here.
A lot of what we wound up talking about was how motivation makes a villain terrifying or…not. A summation of his point (and feel free to tell me if I’m mistaken, Robert) would be that a villain with indiscernible or unfathomable motivation is infinitely more terrifying than a villain who has a genuine emotion behind him.
To some extent, it’s true. To look at his comparison of the Joker and Lord Voldemort, there’s no doubt that the Joker is the more terrifying villain. Though I kind of suspect the comparison is a little unfair. For one, the Joker has been around much longer and even he started off as a goofy lunatic dressed up like a clown who was concerned about boners. It wasn’t until the writers of Batman stopped focusing on the “clown” part and started addressing the fact that this guy was terrifyingly insane that he started to be scary. And that was because someone that insane, who could kill a thousand people to make a point and wore clown make-up like war paint, occupies a strange little uncanny valley in our brains where it’s not likely to happen, but it could happen and just enough of it is realistic that it scares us.
Most of us probably don’t lie awake at night fearing that evil wizards are out to get us because we’re awesome.
But then again, most of us would probably not follow a tremendously overweight, hairy guy in a dirty trenchcoat into the night just because he told us we were special.
Harry Potter is weird.
So yes, the Joker is a more terrifying villain. It’s not necessarily his motive that’s unfathomable so much as his logic. He views society as a joke, sanctity as a set-up and murder as a punchline. The beauty of Batman, as I’ve mentioned before, is that there are no fights, just philosophical dialogues with fists and Joker isn’t going to stop arguing until Batman gets it. The fact that Batman is never going to get it is pretty terrifying.
That momentary nerdgasm aside, I feel the need to point out that the whole “unfathomable motive” thing can go hugely awry in a very quick, very awful way. Frequently, citing Lovecraft as an inspiration as the same way people cite Restless Leg Syndrome as a serious medical condition, people will use words like “unfathomable” and “beyond words” and “too horrifying to be described” and think they’re clever when they’re really just being lazy. The goal is to have created something so horrifying that it just can’t be expressed in mortal terms, but these kinds of buzzwords tend to suggest that it is just too horrible to be expressed in mortal terms and you’re going to have to take the artist’s word at that because he can’t be arsed to show you himself.
This sort of lazy thinking is the same reason we get Dark Lords, Destroyers and Foes of All That Is Good. Villains whose logic is so unfathomable and so inscrutable that it simply isn’t there, whose motivations are so vast and so horrific that they just don’t make sense, and not in a good way. Hopping on the Bandwagon of Darkness tends to lead more often to Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains than to Jokers. Hell, the Joker was a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain for a while. It took a long time for him to be something much more terrifying.
Given that, I can appreciate Robert’s thoughts as to why the Joker is terrifying. But I feel he’s kind of missing the point in a more human villain.
See, what makes the unfathomable terrifying is that it’s vast, it’s unstoppable and it can’t be reasoned with. It’s inhuman. And in being inhuman, it loses us, at least a little bit. This is why Dark Lords aren’t good villains: the characters are largely insignificant and pointless. We don’t care what he’s doing because he’s just that evil. We have to stop him, sure, but that’s as far as the stakes go.
Human villains are not vast or unreasonable and that’s their appeal. They are distorted reflections, what happens when something happens in a hero’s life that makes him do something that he views as right. And it’s that last part, viewing it as right, that makes a villain interesting. Suddenly, he has a reason for doing what he does beyond the fact that he’s evil and since we can understand it, we have some knowledge of what happens if he wins and if he loses. Sympathetic villains are popular for a reason. If the villain is just straight up evil, the ending is pretty much foregone: either the heroes win and all is saved or the author is feeling edgy and oh no they lost and now you feel used like the page-turning hussy your mama always said you were.
A sympathetic villain makes you have a stake in what he does and thus enhances the conflict. Suddenly, the implications are no longer about what happens if the hero loses but what happens if he wins. It turns that mirror upon the hero, to see if he’s actually doing the right thing and leads to character development. If he’s facing The Destroyer/The Dark Lord/The Goblin King, he doesn’t have to change. The other guy is evil, so he’s good. His only problem is stopping the evil.
I have heard some people lament over the lack of straight up black and white heroes (though, to be totally honest, I get the vague suspicion that some, not all, of those people prefer the notion because black versus white used to be much more terrifying in its implications as to who the savage evil orcs were supposed to be) and I can certainly appreciate a straightforward “evil is evil” story when it’s done right.
But it takes a long time to do it right. Joker long. Until then, all you’ve got is boners.
But maybe I’m wrong. What do you think? Are we just so morally starved that even our villains need to be examples of goodness? Or do we straight up need bad guys who are so bad they kick orphaned kittens into the mouths of old ladies so the old ladies choke and die and then they pose the old ladies in hilarious poses for their loved ones to find?
Tell me.
Tell me everything.
In the world according to Ryan, what makes a villain truly terrifying is when they are only one or two steps removed from us and are capable of such terrible things. There is still logic and reason, its not in a form that we recognise, but it can be so familiar that it could be you, or just about anyone.
Yes. I think when something is so unfathomable that it couldn’t possibly happen to us, we’re not that frightened of it. It could happen AT us, but not TO us.
Just off the top of my head, it seems like it is an either/or: the villain should either be unspeakably evil or empathetically so.
Joker is in the first camp – like the better Lovecraftian beasties – his actions are so hideously unknowable and inexplicable that he’s scary like a force of nature. You can’t reason with him, you can’t explain him, you can only quiver in fear and hope he doesn’t notice you. (And by “better” Lovecraftian beasties, I’m leaning more towards “The Color Out of Space”, not Cthulhu).
The empathetic villain is the opposite end of the spectrum. You know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and the fear is partially from the connection you feel: what if I were in that position? What if I had to do these things? I see these folks a lot in noir fiction, where you get people “trapped” into being killers. They’re scary because they know exactly what they’re doing and they know it is wrong.
With both, there’s a sense of inevitability that really makes them frightening. The Alien Evil won’t stop. The Trapped Bastard can’t stop. Voldemort, bless his thin-weave cotton socks, is halfway between the two, and, frankly, a bit shit for it. He’s supposed to be an unknowable evil, but then we’re also given ridiculous flashbacks of his childhood. We learn his motivation, but there’s nothing sympathetic about it. He’s a dork.
(To your blog’s title – that’s why Snape is better. He’s a great example of that second, sympathetic villain. We know why he’s the way he is and, like him or not, it is easy to understand him.)
We just did a thing on ambiguous characters over at PK – an interesting one is David Edding’s Zakath. In the second series, he becomes a soggy biscuit. But in the first, he’s quite frostily admirable. Zakath couldn’t give a shit about the prophecy – he’s been battling with his so-called “allies” for centuries, and the resurrection of his dark god is a real pain in the ass for his plans. He’d be very happy to left alone – except he can’t… and now that he’s drawn in to the big global fight, he needs to win and win quickly. Moreover, as the High Lord of the East, he honestly believes that a fight with the High Lord of the West is inevitable. It isn’t personal, it is realpolitik. He might as well kill all the heroes now, before they get entrenched and make things trickier later on. I do love an evil bureaucrat…
I haven’t read enough Eddings to know for certain, but I don’t at all mind the sound of that. I think one of the underrated qualities of a sympathetic villain is the doubt they inspire. The idea that, if the other guy is so understandable in his logic and so fierce in his devotion, what if I, the so-called hero, am actually in the wrong?
I’ve always maintained that our villains reflect our fears as a society. A metaphor if you like. That’s painting with incredibly broad strokes I admit, but you gotta start somewhere.
In the old days, you had people like Hitler. As a society we weren’t too bothered if he was nice to kittens, the third reich and every German was made of pure evil. Then when Hitler went, it was those darn communists with their nuclear weapons and a finger hovering over a button labelled “Armageddon”. And so if you look at books like Lord of the Rings you see those fears reflected with absolutes.
Flash forward to 2001 and our fears were changing. No longer were we so concerned with that evil tyrant with access to weapons of mass destruction, our fears were about that neighbour next door, who just *might* be a terrorist. Our fears became more complex, less full of absolutes and I think our art reflects that.
I too miss the “evil is evil” characters but I don’t think they can be done without a great deal of consideration paid to motivation. The best examples I’ve seen are the ones where you find yourself agreeing with the villain, nodding along, until that final little point, the one which twists in your gut like a knife and you realise you could never agree with them.
Personally, I’d have to say the villains that I find the most terrifying are the those with at least somewhat understandable motives. If I can look at them and see why they might have ended up that way I find it more disturbing than if they just seem to be trying to set a record for ‘biggest baddie of all time”.
Perhaps every one of us could become a villain under certain circumstances. What if I have the potential to become one? Part of what made the Joker scary for me in The Dark Knight was his ability to turn apparently ‘good’ people into monsters. I’ve heard it said that what we truly fear is not being powerless but being all powerful. Maybe that’s what makes relatable villains that much more scary.
Furthermore, even if it’s fantasy it’s easier to be scared of something that we find plausible. Maybe, just maybe, my next door neighbor could turn out to be a Joker style psychopathic serial killer. I’d probably notice if he started amassing an orc horde and building a large and sinister black marble tower though.
Nevertheless, I think either way can work if it’s done well. It just depends on what kind of story you’re trying to write.
That was Joker’s appeal, yes: his argument, to use the metaphor, eventually swayed people to his side. But that’s because they could see his logic.
Now, with the orc horde example, that’s slightly ominous, yes. But what happens if your neighbor starts taking in the orc refugees and supporting them when they’re on the brink of starvation? What if he then goes about addressing that starvation? Things get slightly stickier.
That’s more problematic, yes. In that case he’d be the good guy, at least from the starving orcs perspective. Even if the dark lord is purely evil and merely helping the orcs in order to manipulate them the hordes would have legitimate motivations. Could we still leisurely watch the ‘hero’ kill thousands of them if we knew they were doing it to feed their starving orc babies? Will someone please think of the orc children?! I’d consider that to be an example of when an evil for evils sake villain is done wel.
A neighbor like that is probably much more likely to become a dangerous tyrant and amass followers than if he was ruling purely with an iron fist, killing his own followers whenever he felt like it. That always confuses me in some books. Certain villains (eg. Voldemort to some extent) may be perfectly willing to kill their own followers whenever they are even slightly ticked off and yet even after killing their 25th second in command just to show how badass they are, there still seems to be an unending stream of people willing to step up. That won’t happen to me!
There was this brilliant psychological study/thing that Dan Wells alluded to in the ‘Writing Excuses’ podcast. Basically that it’s been kinda proved/theorised that the defenders and enforcers of law/morality/society have to also be a little bit sociopathic so that they can do what the normal people can’t do – namely the usual heroic.brave/dumb actions that screw up Mr Big-Bad’s plans. I think good villains are kind of cast out of that theory – they do things that are utterly disproportionate, but are otherwise extensions of ways we’d chieve our goals.
Take Hans Gruber of Die Hard. He’s a bank robber – just so happens that in order to rob a bank he is prepared to kill pretty much anyone. Disproportionate, yes, but he’ll do it and you believe he will first. Now look at Bond. When he’s on the chase property get smashed, businesses blown sky-high, explosions, collateral damage, innocent people put in harms way – utterly disproportionate, yes, but he’ll do it and you believe he will.
The villains that scare me the most are the ones who believe they are totally in the right. Whether they are or not doesn’t matter. In real life those are the people that scare me the most as well. They think that their cause is noble and don’t think twice about killing innocent people who don’t believe what they believe. People who kill without a second thought, who are completely unfazed by death. Those are the ones that scare me. Partially because I cannot comprehend how anyone could kill so easily and partly because I know there are people who think that way in real life. And the idea that someone as horrific as that could exist in real life as well as in fiction is what really freaks me out in a story.
The Joker is also made more of a threat by Batman’s flat refusal to simply put a bullet in that sick mind. The hero is made just as inflexible and implacable as the villain, an interesting dichotomy.
I don’t think such gray areas are a modern thing, though: even Moses looked around before smoking the Overseer.
I think for a villain to be interesting, one of two things has to be true. either you have to understand their motive, which not only makes them sympathetic but also might terrify you that you can understand and sympathize with a mass murderer, or they have to revel in what they do. It occurs to me that the best pure evil villains out their, or at least the most fun, thrill in torturing slowly and destroying utterly. And their joy is obvious, the author doesn’t just write “he was a sadist,” they show his child-like gleeful smile as he drowns a box of kittens. and that glee really should be a recognizable glee. and by that i mean i would prefer a villain to clap his hands like a three-year old and giggle himself silly than give a cliche evil laugh as he watches those kittens sink to the bottom of a lake. i have nothing against evil laughs, mind you, but pure glee is much more entertaining in my opinion. perhaps because we see it mirrored in the every-day innocent.
my favorite villain of all time would be cansrel, from Kristen Cashore’s book Fire. his main motivation for raping, killing, etc. is boredom. he and his daughter have the power to control minds, and he uses his powers for unspeakable things because, well, he is bored. he also abuses drugs, but his favorite drug is when he lets his daughter practice mind control on himself. he cares for his daughter a great deal. she is the what a “reasonable person” would consider “good,” and makes him feel happiness, compassion, and contentment, things he has never felt in his everyday life. he loves it. i’m not one hundred percent sure on which side he would fall. a bit of both, i would think. he is a person, this is very clear in the loving way with which he treats his daughter (he buys her a puppy, then kills it when it bites her)but he still manages to do terrible things and feel no remorse,because he doesn’t really understand what remorse is or why he should feel it. he probably doesn’t even understand what the word “evil” means.
edit: perhaps an unfathomable villain EITHER has to “revel in it” (as i said) or not enjoy it at ALL. because clear lack of enjoyment is really what brings up the question, “why?”
A lot of villains who inhabit that sort of abstract evil-by-definition space are in stories where the villain isn’t really the point. They can afford to be simple, because the driving conflict comes from some other source, and in many cases, it may be better that they are simple so they don’t distract from that other conflict. Perhaps if the villain is the central conflict of the story, this necessitates greater complexity, and the audience needs to relate more strongly to the villain, so we get villains with greater depth, and with greater fidelity, they become less abstract and more frightening.
However, just because the villain is less frightening, doesn’t mean the story is necessarily less frightening. With Lovecraft, at least as I read it, what is supposed to be scary is not the stuff that is too scary to describe, but rather the idea that there are some experiences, that nightmarish heart of darkness, that will change you, irrevocably, for the worse, and that threat of madness provides the disturbing and compelling conflict of those stories. The tentacly monsters themselves are largely irrelevant, they are a means to an end.
Arguably, the same is true of Sauron in LotR. Sure, he is down there in Mordor, being his relentlessly evil self. Firing up that forge of conquest or whatever. It’s pretty badass, but it’s not that scary. The compelling drama in the story is that these heroes do something that is continually and unrelentingly hard, and exhausting, and requiring of personal sacrifice and loss. The elements of that story that we fear aren’t really the evil lord, but the grim truth of war, the senseless loss in great, barely imaginable number of lovers and fathers and brothers and friends. It is that sense that there are only so many of us to stand and fight and there will soon be none that the heroes struggle against, and particularly for the WWII generation, that was a particularly real and visceral and likely frightening prospect.