How to Write Compelling Villains · 3:33pm Oct 24th, 2020
I posted this a while ago as a reply comment to a blog of Wanderer D's, but thought it was worth a blog of its own. Because this is something so many people screw up, when it's really the easiest thing to get right, and I struggle to understand how many seem to find it so hard.
Villains don't need to be relatable, realistic, under/overpowered, flawed, human, fleshed-out, anything like that. Many of those things often help, but they aren't actually necessary for a villain to be compelling. For a villain to be compelling, the only requirement is that they are
Fun!
No one remembers the name of the hero in Mean Girls (it was Cady). Everyone remembers Regina George, because she owned every second she was on the screen, to the point that the movie is even named after her. No one cared about any of the vampires in the first season or so of Buffy. The moment Spike showed up, forgoing pretentious ritual in favour of an axe and a trenchcoat, everyone went wild. The moment people remember most from The Dark Knight wasn't the Joker fighting Batman, or the morality play he set up with the rigged ferries, it was the magic trick with the pencil. Because it was fun!
Gul Dukat, Queen Chrysalis, Scar, Blofeld, Freddy Kruger, Magneto and Mystique, Hannibal Lecter - these are all characters who are most iconic when they're smiling. Smug, condescending, psychopathic smiles, sure, but smiles nonetheless.
I think part of the reason people go so wrong is in mistakenly thinking they're writing/filming/coding real life. They aren't. The purpose of a story is, more than anything else, to entertain us. And a villain's most important qualification is that they're entertaining.
Perhaps that's a better way to phrase it than that they're fun. Fun is probably the easiest way to achieve them being entertaining. But it comes in other flavours, too. Dr. Gaius Baltar twisting the truth with such charisma that he manipulates everyone around him. Kim Jong Il singing about his loneliness. Davy Jones playing the organ with his beard. Agent Smith's hammy overacting. The relishing of misdeeds in everyone Charles Dance plays. Ramiel screaming geometrically.
The point is that in real life, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near someone like Sheev Palpatine. You'd want Anton Chigurh to be locked away as far from you as possible, and never released. You'd be crying out for Adagio Dazzle to be punished for her 'crimes'.
But in fiction, all that matters is that they're entertaining. And that's why we think far more highly of those three than we do of Sauron, or President Snow, or the Pony of Shadows. That's why we remember Heath Ledger's Joker more than Aaron Eckhart's Two Face in the same film, despite both being superb performances. That's why Ghostface became a horror icon, while the killer from I Know What You Did Last Summer was forgotten.
Make the villain entertaining to the audience, and the audience will want to see more of them.
It's a fine balance. You shouldn't sympathize with the villain (not more than you do with the hero, anyway,) but you should enjoy them.
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Definitely. People not being great at writing heroes is a whole other blog post!
Good advice!
I feel very inclined to quibble with this answer. Most of that, I think, comes down to the terms here being very nebulous. "Fun" is one of the most vague, subjective terms I can think of, and "entertaining," I'd almost say is even worse than that, because at least "fun" carries some connotation of light-heartedness or cheer or humor or things along those lines. When your answer to making a villain is compelling is to just say "make them entertaining," I really question whether you've not just moved the goalposts to some other spot that's actually not really any different from the one you started with. Those two questions, how to be compelling and how to be entertaining, are both so broad and abstract, with so many possible answers.
And then I'd also question whether a villain entertaining is all that you need. The Dazzlings, for instance. Very entertaining, sure. Are they compelling, though? Depending on what we mean by compelling, I might say no. They're competently-executed, but I'd say that, if we're just talking about Rainbow Rocks, their narrative has such an abrupt ending and their motives are so simplistic and shallow that, I mean, are they all that great? I love them, but so much of that is based on me filling in the blanks by myself that I don't know how much credit the actual person who wrote their dialogue for Rainbow Rocks deserves. I suppose you can call them "compelling," in that you want to see more of them, but I'd say they accomplish that by being essentially incomplete, kind of teasing you with scenarios and ideas that they don't actually explore at all.
It just seems, to me, that "entertaining" has very surface-level connotations. And that's not something you should ignore completely; I do agree that you should generally be striving to make villains entertaining. But, at least for me, if you label two characters as "entertaining," that's taking such a broad, simplistic look at them that it doesn't account at all for a lot of things that might elevate one or diminish the other, so asserting that that's all you need sounds like a great way to make memorable but mediocre villains.
5384945 I would say compelling, in this situation, is the notion of the readers wanting to see more of them. To see the villain's presence in the scene as being a good thing because of who the villains are (as opposed to dramatic reasons like big showdowns with the hero).
The reasons I can think of for why one might want to see more of a character is because you like them, or because they're interesting, or entertaining. Whether or not you should like the villain in a piece is a different matter, and probably not a good thing to aim for. So that leaves interesting and entertaining. For them to be interesting, it helps if they can be something different to what we've seen before. Sombra, for example, isn't terribly interesting, because he's a pretty stock villain archetype. But Cozy Glow is quite new and special. Still, that's too much to ask for some villains.
So we're left with them being entertaining. Something about them has to be enjoyable to watch/read about. That's most easily and frequently achieved with villainous glee, the kind Alan Rickman delivers. That'd be what I'd call fun, in that respect. But it comes in other flavours too, like Hux's charisma giving his big Nuremberg speech. I suppose even sex appeal would count in that regard.
With the sirens, is it really the gaps that make you want to see more? Sunset wasn't much less mysterious, and we don't know that much more about Gloriosa, Juniper, Wallflower etc. Ok, we know a bit more, but not oodles more. I think it's more down to the dynamic between the three of them and the ease with which they twist everyone around them. Their interactions are entertaining, and their competence is interesting.
Ah, no one said they wouldn't be that. Or that a villain didn't need more to be worthwhile. But if you want them to be compelling, then yes, I'd say that's exactly what you need.
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Is this referring to the bit in the blog where you talked about how you wouldn't want to actually be in a room with most of these people? If so, sure, I can see that. I strongly disagree that you shouldn't aim to have people like a villain--I think you should aim to have something to like about every important character in a story--but that's more in a sense of appreciating how they're written, I suppose, than wanting them to actually exist and hang out with you or something like that.
I don't know that I like the separation of interesting and entertaining here. Again, I think the latter is such a broad label that almost any other positive quality is going to be kind of assimilated into it. Interest certainly contributes to entertainment, I would say. If I find a character or story interesting, I tend to enjoy thinking about them and scrutinizing them a lot, which I would call entertainment. And if there's nothing of interest happening, I think it's noticeably harder to be entertaining. Not impossible, but harder.
Yes.
Okay, I mean. It's not the only factor. But I do think there's a reason that, like, every amazing siren story ever either explores their history, tackles them dealing with the loss of their power and adjusting to a mortal, mundane life, or both. That's not to say that their personalities and interactions and stuff don't contribute; they do. But if I had to limit myself to just one imagining of more sirens, it'd absolutely, no questions asked, involve filling in at least some of those gaps as a high priority, and I would rather deviate from their canon personalities slightly but answer some of those questions than preserve the former exactly but neglect the latter.
Okay, sure. I suspect my usual interpretation of compelling is closer to worthwhile. But with the definition you've given, yeah, I think entertainment alone can, erm. Well, I still don't know that alone is adequate--I'd add at least a minimal standard of consistency as well, but that again could be called a facet of entertainment rather than a separate quality. But I do agree that to an extent a villain can be carried fairly well by being entertaining. Those aren't the villains I love, generally, but they do have their place.
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I think Joffrey Baratheon would be a pretty good recent example. He drives the plot, he commands every scene he's in, he has a very distinct personality, set of motivations and all that. And he's also completely without likeable qualities and you spend every moment wanting him to die horribly. That's what I mean as to whether or not having your villain be liked is actually a good thing, they're often a much better force in the story when you don't like them.
But that does require a certain quality of writing and storytelling, I think. The number of truly loathsome villains I can think of really isn't very large. Only about three spring to mind off the top of my head. Whereas there are a lot more where I think the writers have aimed at that and assumed hatred will carry their villains. When they haven't done a good enough job of making us care for that to really have much weight, and that's where the villain ends up being just meh.
I think the separation is necessary because most villains out there don't have much going on that's interesting. Nightmare Moon, Sombra, Tirek, the Pony of Shadows etc, none of them really have much going on that's interesting. But Tirek is by far the most entertaining, so he stands out. Every villain would love to be Chrysalis or Discord, and be a unique presence who you're busy trying to understand while also thwart, but most aren't, and this is to give those other ones at least something to make their existence a positive experience for the audience.
I don't really know what to say to this? I figured out a backstory I liked for them early on and stuck with it unless told otherwise, so it's no big deal for me if a story doesn't touch the issue. I think it's absolutely something that a more in-depth look at the sirens would go into, but I don't think exploring any mysteries there ties in with why those stories are good. I think it's more that if you're going to take a proper look at the characters, then their past together is something that will be referred to from time to time.
Of course, it's taken this long of talking about it for me to notice I don't think I've ever really written a villain. So the question of what position I'm in to say anything comes up too.
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Yeah, I've not seen an instance of that happening off the top of my head. Usually when I don't like a villain, it's more because I think they're written badly than them being loathsome as a person. But, again, I might well be in the minority there. The villain in Claymore doesn't have many positive qualities, and she kills off my favorite character and I've seen people say they really hated her for it, but in the moment I was just thinking that I loved how the scene in question was written, because the character dying was incredibly predictable but the circumstances of it I thought were fairly shocking and abrupt to make up for it in a way that made sense for the characters, and that made me like the villain as opposed to hating her for being evil.
So, again, from my perspective, I think even pretty despicable villains should be likable, but that's not so much in the sense of how people are likable so much as there should be aspects of their character and their role in the story that I can appreciate.
I don't disagree. My point was that if, as you said in your blog, the ultimate goal is to entertain, most positive qualities can be lumped together as entertaining, in which case a villain being interesting is just a means to the end of being entertaining. I didn't say, and I don't think, that being interesting is the only way to be entertaining, just that it tends to make it happen more so than not being interesting does. Perhaps there is some villain out there who's incredibly interesting but also dreadfully dull, but I don't think I've seen one.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about when I said:
Because at that point, you're explicitly inventing writing where there isn't any, and presumably basing your opinions of the character off that. Which, in fairness, doesn't necessarily work against your definition of compelling. I do think that a villain where you need to do this is weaker than a villain where you don't, all other things being equal, though.
And to be clear, I think it's a stretch to say you need to invent backstory for the sirens. Rainbow Rocks works just fine without more than it did. But I think if you're praising the characters specifically, the amount that's left unspoken isn't objectively a good thing.
But when it comes to the gaps, I'm not nearly as interested in the past as I am in the future. Where the sirens came from, how they got there, we know as much about that as I think we need to. I do still think there's potential there, though--again, the two categories of good siren stories are filling in their backstory or developing the ramifications of their defeat, and the details of the backstory certainly could influence the story of their future. It's the latter that I think is more necessary to make their narrative complete, hence why I've more of an interest there, but there's certainly reason to be interested in the former.
No, I'd agree, but more so because I think it's giving more credit than Rainbow Rocks deserves to call the siren's background a mystery? It is one, for the most part, but I'd say that there's so little to grasp at that there isn't a solution to it. If you want to explore their background, that's much less dependent on you piecing together what information canon gives to and extrapolating to logical corollaries and much more you just inventing something interesting.
5385624 I was away from fimfiction for a few days, but I agree with everything here