Motivation is important to every character in a story, and villains are no exception. If it’s not clear why a villain is acting the way they are, then the audience won’t get behind the story. Motivation can be simple for unsympathetic villains, but for sympathetic ones, there should be more depth. Motivation that is too complicated can be bad too, because it will end up confusing the audience.

Oftentimes, a villain’s motivations are simple. They want power, money, something basic we can all understand. These are your generic villains, usually. It’s a quick and easy way to develop them. We don’t need to know their whole backstory to understand why they want what they want. However, it can be a little dull and make the villain bland. You’ll have to put more time into making them distinct from other villains.

If you want the villain to be sympathetic, then there will have to be more depth to them. I’ll take an example once again from Person of Interest, because it was good at this. The villain Elias was shown at first to be a mob boss who wanted to run New York City. But his motivation was soon made clear: He was abandoned by his father, who had his mother murdered. After that he sought revenge on his father, himself a mob boss. Elias also sought to claim what he believed to be his birthright, that is taking over the city. It’s clear, it’s understandable, and Elias was so dignified and charismatic that I wanted him to succeed.

The problem comes when a villain’s motives are too complicated. They want something specific, so there’s a reason they want it, one that may not be clear. An easy way to fix this is by having the villain gloat about their master plan. This often explains not only what, but why. If their plan is so complicated that people don’t understand it, you may lose part of your audience. The same goes for their motivation. I don’t need to like them, but I want to know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Villain and antagonist motivations can be easy to get right, but also easy to mess up. Which makes it like everything else in writing. If in doubt, it’s okay to do something simple. The Joker is an iconic villain for a reason. His motivation is simple: he’s insane. Simple motivations can make a memorable villain, but sympathetic ones need more depth. It’s up to you which one you choose.

#Essay #Characters #Villains

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Villains come in all varieties, but one of the big questions to ask is sympathetic or pure evil? A sympathetic villain is one whose motives are not only clear, but we think “Yeah, I can understand that”. Pure evil is self-explanatory. That’s the kind of villain that doesn’t cuddle puppies, but kicks them. Hungry? That baby’s candy looks delicious, and its tears will probably taste good too. There are great examples of each in literature.

In Redwall, Cluny the Scourge is pure evil. He wants to rule the world, and will happily kill anyone that gets in his way. In Animorphs, Visser Three has a bad habit of decapitating his underlings. Visser’s in a bad mood? Decapitated. Didn’t take off fast enough? Decapitated. Interrupted the Visser? Decapitated. While both of them are pure evil, we understand their motives. Cluny isn’t given a backstory, but we accept what he’s doing. He’s built up as a nightmare, a legend, a force that conquers the world. We don’t need more than that. But saying “That one’s pure evil” isn’t enough to make your audience believe it. You have to make your readers feel it. The name “Visser Three” looks evil to me, because this was done well.

In Wings of Fire, Darkstalker is a sympathetic villain. We see him talk to Moonwatcher and show her his vision of a better world he wants. The way he gets there is what makes him a villain. He’s been corrupted by his power, believes his way is right, and isn’t good at listening. We don’t want to see him killed by the heroes, we want to see him realize the errors of his ways. Sympathetic villains walk the line between antagonist and villain, a distinction I’ll talk about more in depth next week.

When writing either a pure evil or sympathetic villain, it’s important not to skip on motivation. Their motives should be clear to the readers, even if not clear to the main characters. The choice depends on the story you want to write. Classic fairy tales often have pure evil villains so the choice is easy. Sympathetic villains should be used if you want your readers to think more about it. It’s your writing, so it’s your choice.

#Essay #Villains #Characters

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In many stories that focus around children or teenagers, it suddenly falls to them to save the world. In Harry Potter, Animorphs, and Wings of Fire teenagers suddenly find themselves responsible for the fate of the world. That leaves the question any responsible adult would ask: Where are the adults? Why aren’t they taking care of this? Why is it down to children or teenagers to save the world? I’m going to look at a few different approaches, but one I’m going to intentionally skip is that the adults are too incompetent to do it.

In Harry Potter, Harry is “the chosen one”. This is a cheap trick to explain away this problem. A prophecy claims someone has to change the world. No choice. No adults allowed. Otherwise, there’s no reason this person is doing this alone. As with all cheap tricks, they’re overused, because they’re easy. Fate says it has to be this way, so there’s no need to explain what qualifies – or forces – them to do the job. Further, the adults in Harry Potter are mostly absent from the main conflicts. A prophecy said that Harry has to defeat Voldemort, and everyone’s so afraid of him, that for the most part, they don’t try. I’m oversimplifying this, but the point is that Harry Potter takes a bad approach to this, and there are far better ways to do this.

The series Wings of Fire plays with this a little. There’s still a prophecy, but the main characters decide that if people are all expecting them to save the world, then they’ll do it their own way. They are in the unique position of being the only dragons (all the characters are dragons) that know about members of other tribes. In the midst of a war pushing two decades, this puts them in a unique position to save the world. But the adults outside of the war want to help them and keep them safe.

This is similar to the approach in Animorphs. The series follows a group of teenagers that were chosen to fight an alien invasion by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. They met another alien that told them about the invasion, making them the only humans who know about it. In this sense, they are “the chosen ones”, but chosen not by fate or destiny, but by another fighter in the war. Like in Wings of Fire, there’s no one they can trust to help them. Once their parents find out about the war, they offer their support, showing that they care about what happens to the main characters.

In Girl in Red, Hermione was the one that had to be involved in their war, despite protests from everyone from her parents to Dumbledore. As in Animorphs, she was chosen by another combatant (Rose) to fight an enemy only they understood, because it was too dangerous to reveal anything about said enemy. But this didn’t stop her parents from worrying, nor from the adults trying to help. It wasn’t that fate said it had to be this way, it was something about her and the people she knew. When children in particular read books about other people their age saving the world, they like to imagine that they can too. I think it’s better to teach them that there’s something special about them that they could use to save the world, rather than to teach them that one person is chosen for this for no reason. It’s also important that they know they can go to adults for help, even when they think they can’t.

When writing about younger characters tackling grownup problems, at the very least, the grownups should be protesting. If not, finding other ways to show that they care can go a long way, not only to develop the characters and their families and friends, but to improve the quality of your story. If you’re going to have children or teenagers saving the world, it should be because there’s something special about them, not because the adults are incompetent.

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When I started Girl in Red, I knew Rose was overpowered. That was the point, to have fun with her solving problems in unnecessarily complicated or violent ways. As it went on, I wanted more drama, more tension, and that was difficult with her being so powerful. This is a problem that I’ve seen come up in various media – mostly anime – so I’m going to discuss the different approaches to this problem I’ve seen.

Remove Their Power

The first approach is removing the power of the character, temporarily or permanently. I find that, unless done with subtlety and care, the direct approach is often the wrong approach in writing. Like using adverbs over and over, it’s lazy, and there are better approaches.

The example of this going poorly in my mind is the show Heroes, a show that ran back in the late 2000s about a group of people that discovered they had superpowers. One character could copy the powers of people around him, but as the series progressed, he was stripped of his powers. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the way they did it was. In the span of an episode, they took him from being one of the nicest characters to being one of the meanest, using that as the justification for taking his powers. When you make a drastic change like this, it risks alienating your audience. I still enjoy the first season, but if I had to pick a point where the show started going downhill, it’d be that moment.

An example of doing this well was in the book series Earthsea. Early on in the series, it’s established that it’s possible for a wizard to lose his power if he overuses it. Sure enough, this happens to one of the main characters later in the series. While this was a drastic change, it came at the end of one of the books, and wasn’t done in a way that felt like the author was just trying to get rid of this character, whereas that’s exactly how it felt in Heroes. Such a change should feel natural, inevitable, even if takes the reader by surprise.

Remove Them

Another approach that can get old is removing the character entirely. Removing a main character for any reason, even if it makes sense for the plot, also risks losing part of your audience (I lost half of mine when Rose left Girl in Red for a few books). Like removing the character’s power, it should be done well, and not look like you’re getting rid of them because you don’t know how to handle them.

An instance of this being done both poorly and well is in Dragon Ball Z. The main character often drops out of the show, leaving the other characters to bide their time waiting for him to arrive and handle the newest big bad for them. It goes poorly because this happens so much in the franchise. It goes well because at the time, it’s not obvious that this is being done intentionally. Characters are fighting all the time; the franchise is known for that. Thus, characters are knocked out of the fight. Once again, it feels natural until you look back and think “have you been doing this the whole time?”

Throw More Obstacles at Them

The series Scorpion focuses around a team of specialists solving problems “only they can handle”. The writers used this next approach on almost every episode to keep the plot moving, rather than having them solve every problem in minutes. That is, they kept having something else go wrong. When someone is actively fighting against the main characters, this is understandable. When bad luck happens over and over again, you can only hold onto your audience so long until you lose suspension of disbelief.

Apart from not doing this all the time, a better approach is to hint at the oncoming problems early on. For example, having someone mentioning that a door keeps sticking, then having it jam shut later. Or that the roof’s been leaking before it breaks apart from a torrential downpour. Otherwise, something’s just going to go wrong out of nowhere, and while it will work for the first 50 times, your audience will get tired of it eventually.

Improve the Antagonists

Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without an opponent like Moriarty, someone who can challenge him on his level. When you focus around one central character, improving the antagonists to match their talent or power is a good way to go. It creates good conflict.

This can be a problem when there are other central characters that aren’t as talented. This is a problem I have with Dragon Ball Z, in that the other characters become irrelevant to the plot because the villains are so powerful so that they challenge the main character. That’s opposed to the franchise One Piece (another anime/manga), where not only the main character is improved, but so are the other characters.

If they’re not going to be improved to the level of the antagonist, then they need to have something else to do. In the finale of Girl in Red, while only one person could challenge the main antagonist, the others weren’t all sitting on the sidelines cheering her on. They were all busy doing something else important. This was something I always did for the finales; everyone had a part to play.

Challenge the Protagonist Outside Their Expertise

In my opinion, this is the best solution. In Maniac in Maroon (book three), there were Dementors at Hogwarts. Rose could’ve destroyed them easily, but Dumbledore reminded her that it wouldn’t help, that this wasn’t a problem she could solve with brute force. Rose had to work to find another solution, forcing her to think outside her normal approach.

This is commonly used in horror stories. It wouldn’t be exciting if the protagonists could fight the serial killer. Instead, they have to find another way to survive, while they keep getting picked off. They might all be smart or talented in other ways, and that could serve them well in their fight for survival.

Of course, eventually the audience will probably want to see a character break out of their shell and fight back. At the end of Maniac in Maroon, that’s exactly what I did with Rose. Especially when the audience knows how talented this character is, they’ll eventually want to see them use that talent.

Conclusion

As with every approach, there are ways to do it right, and ways to do it wrong. No one solution is perfect. If you’re going to make a drastic change to the story to manage the power imbalance, it should be surprising, but inevitable. If you’re going to improve the antagonists, don’t forget about the other protagonists. Challenge the characters on different levels, rather than throwing more obstacles at them without consideration for how challenging it’ll be. Many things in life require finding the right balance, and writing is no exception.

#Essay #Characters #Drama

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA