The reason why there are so many rapists and traitors in fiction · 9:46am Feb 24th, 2017
There are a number of very serious crimes. Rape. Kidnapping. Arson. Armed Robbery. Mayhem.
And of course, there's the three that can earn you to the death penalty in the US - murder, treason, and espionage.
Murder is, perhaps, the worst crime there is. And there are lots of villains who are indeed murderers.
But if you've spent a while around fiction, you'll find that there are an awful lot of villains who, despite being murderers, also do lots of other Very Bad Stuff. Rape is one of the big ones. Treason and espionage are big in thrillers. And we all know that villians love to kidnap people, especially the hero's loved ones.
And restrict their child's playtime on video games to a half hour on Sunday, the fiends!
Why is this? Why isn't them being a murderer enough more often?
In fiction, heroes kill an awful lot of people. It is harder to see a villain as a Special Kind of Evil when your hero has a body count that would put Ted Bundy to shame. And thus, it is common for villains in stories to have done other Bad Things on top of the usual killing people because, in a lot of media, killing people is relatively commonplace, and thus audiences tend to take it less seriously.
That's not to say that being a murderer isn't enough, but the reason why you so frequently see villains portrayed as such nasty people - and why other crimes feature so strongly, despite the fact that in real life, their body count would more than suffice - is that if your hero kills people, a lot of people will want to differentiate their hero more from their opponent, at least if they don't want the story to be a case of Black and Gray Morality.
Note, however, that while this sort of shorthand can be effective at getting the audience on the right side and not make them wonder if maybe your hero who has killed three dozen people to avenge one person might be a total sociopath, it isn't necessarily going to make your villains particularly interesting. Evil Badguy #64 may be a bad person and need to go down, but making a villain compelling is not really related to making them more evil. King Sombra enslaved an entire city-state; Discord constantly annoys and messes with people. Discord is not "more evil" than Sombra (though he did do some pretty bad stuff), but he is a much more compelling villain.
Now you know.
And knowing is half the battle!
Interesting position. It raises an interesting corollary: in stories where the heroes are pacifists/the stakes are "lower", does a villain still need to have these additional negative qualities in order to be a valid threat? Is each individual story able to set its own moral compass, or does the general trend desensitize potential readers. Put another way, does moral relativism apply to fiction?
I suppose verisimilitude could be a factor. In theory, the closer a story is to the real world, the less heinous its villains need to be to compare. But at the same time, you have ostensibly realistic shows that still need to have exaggerated villains (like how the last season of Breaking Bad has Nazi gangsters, rather than the boring, run-of-the-mill gangsters of previous seasons
). And then there's the type of fiction that purports to be realistic, but takes place in a cartoonish version of reality with these same sort of rapist-murderer-traitor villains (like most Lifetime movies).
What? No Rainbow laser?
4434619
A lot of school shows have low-grade bullies who work just fine; Duck Tales employed fairly silly villains as well, by and large. I think that the line goes up as the heroes take more extreme measures; the more transgressive the heroes are, the more transgressive the villains tend to be, in order to differentiate them more from the heroes. The more brutal the violence Batman employs, for instance, the worse his villains tend to behave; when he's just punching people out in a sort of cartoonish/stylish way, his villains tend to have less lethal schemes, whereas when he beats the snot out of people, his villains kill people.
I'd like to add an interesting tidbit, as far as this kind of observations go, according to my own experience with a story I'm writing. The protagonist of the story is basically an unrepenting, merciless murderer of a massive scale, with his only saving grace being regretting the death of a handful against millions, and his fierce protectiveness of a few select ponies, especially a couple that he has unoficially adopted in a way. Make no mistake though, there is a reason the story at part indirectly compares him to characters like Sauron, and not even him denies what he really is.
Now, the funny part is that we have this character on one side. On the other we have a pony which acts almost professional in her way of showing her loathing, is rude and dismissive to Rarity, and probably had people sent to beat her up to make a point.
Now, guess which character the readers REALLY hate and want to see dead?
I'm not certain I agree with the reasons exactly.
I think the reason murder isn't enough is that murder is no longer shocking to audiences. We're used to it. You have to add some depravity to murder, or it isn't disturbing enough. Hot-blooded murder is common: you see it in the news every day, and we can imagine killing somepony in the heat of the moment. Unless somepony is a cold-blooded serial killer or engages in other depravity like torture or rape or killing by cutting off their head a-la ISIS, it doesn't really register.
Also, the reason Discord is a more compelling villain isn't because of his list of crimes. We've actually seen Discord torment ponies on the show. King Sombra's legacy remains, but we never actually witness him hurting anypony. If the show had developed Sombra's character and shown some of his atrocities, Discord would have seemed silly by comparison.
You really have to work at it to get convicted and executed for Treason in the United States, no matter how often the charge is carelessly flung around in Washington in all directions. Wikipedia shows nine total people, although my first reaction to reading the list was "Where are the Rosenbergs?" Turns out they were convicted of espionage by passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, not treason. Learn something new every day, I guess.
One of the great appeals of a great villain is if the writer can get inside their head and make the reader nod quietly and say, "I can see their point, but..." Example in point, Dr. Impossible from Soon I Will Be Invincible, a supervillain who possesses super-human strength and intellect and suffers from Malign Hypercognition Disorder ("evil genius" syndrome). (wiki) I've actually read the book twice (no, not as an instruction manual), the first time with a bad case of "I don't get it" and the second when the little lightbulb went off in my EZ Bake brain.
Hm. Malign Hypercognition Disorder. It explains a lot about the recent election on both sides.
It is the Y rating. Murder for some reason is harder to get away with than enslavement, kidnapping, and even mental domination seems to be.
4434641
I was going to bring up Batman, but you answered my question with what you put down. Anyway, that got me thinking, and the best examples I can think of for each side would be the 1966 Batman movie and 2005's Batman Begins.
It seems like the problem here isn't villains at all, it's an audience that wants their hero to stand on top of a body pile and still pretend that they're watching a black and white morality play. I wonder if that's why Batman is so incredibly popular: He's probably the most famous hero of all time who is "edgy" and "dark" but whose actual actions (in most stories) are not nearly as controversial as other "dark," "edgy" heroes.
4434736 Man I loved that story, read it twice myself. And I also especially appreciated the formal definition of MHD. It's a shame Dr. Impossible was never incarcerated in the same place as Lex Luthor; they could form a support group.
Having an antagonist who's merely a murderer is boring literature. Most readers have the IQ of a lawnmower and need the antagonist's motivations expressed in concrete and explicit detail in order to distinguish them from the protagonist. Having yet another story where Joe Blow murders Jane Doe with a shovel just doesn't cut it anymore.
In literary circles, there's a division between the appropriate (A man stops at the stoplight and waits for the light to turn green before driving onward) and the inappropriate (A man gets cut in line by a teenager at a Starbucks and retaliates by blowing the kid's fucking brains out). One of those is dull and uninteresting while the other is so laughably comical as to jar the reader out of the story they were otherwise engaged in. The goal of the writer should be to write something just taboo enough to catch the reader's interest without being so out of left field as to break the reader's immersion.
Unfortunately, that range has been shifting ever further into the comical these days. While reading a story about a young girl who is habitually molested by her step father and seems conflicted about her personal enjoyment in the matter was considered controversial twenty years ago, such a story would be considered tame by modern day standards. It would need a boost (such as the stepfather also beating her) in order to gain the shock and disgust of such a story's audience, and in failing to do so would be dead on arrival.
Where all of this will take us, I'm unsure.
Best regards,
~VS
Honestly, I think its a silly issue. You can make a villain do a lot of crimes, you can make a villain do nothing that is illegal but is just really mean, and either way you can have a good villain. Some villains just need more things than murder to establish a strong relationship with a protagonist though... That is where conflict lies. Relationships. Pure and simple. Literature can crank out a bunch of evil McBadfaces, but you can botch every single one of them.
Some characters are really good because they are simply a murderer. I think Yoshikage Kira stands out as a well played psychopathic murderer. Never late for work and always respectful. A decent worker too... its just that he has this thing for women's hands and blowing people up. He doesn't kill all too many people, but you care about the town and the fact that he always gets away with it. He is convincing because he is personal and quirky and interesting.
Even to say that it is to offset your protagonists killing people seems contradictory to what you even said. Sombra supposedly kills lots, but the mane six don't kill anybody. The point isn't the offset the main six. Sombra fails because he is so underdeveloped that he makes no impressions on people. Discord succeeds because he communicates. The way he does things, his array of wacky gestures, the trials he makes ponies undergo, all of them say something about him. Discord works as a villain because he is expressive. Sombra mumbles and stays off screen most of the time, of course he is going to fail as a villain.
4434641 That raises yet another question; is all of this actually a result of comparative morality? Or is it a result of where the work falls on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism?
Followup question: are the two aspects--the morality of the work and the comparative morality of the protagonist and antagonist--inextricably linked or not? Do the characters moralities have to match the work and each other, or just one or the other?