Being a Better Writer: Sympathetic Villains · 10:07pm Jan 22nd, 2018
... are a mistaken understanding.
Okay, that's a strong statement as a lead-in for today's post, but it has merit! Welcome back to Being a Better Writer, the weekly writing guide post where we discuss, well, writing topics of all kind.
Today's topic, Sympthetic Villains, is another request topic. It's also a topic that I knew would inspire a bit of controversy when I tackled it, particularly among newer writers, because of the amount of misunderstanding I've seen concerning it. Misunderstanding that comes from, unfortunately, the name itself and the oft-mistaken misuse of two similar but different words: sympathy ... and empathy.
See, a lot of people use the former when they mean the latter. And, to be fair, the two share similar meanings. Sympathy is defined firstly as "feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune," and empathy is defined as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another."
Pretty close, right? Well, you'd think so until you saw the second, third, or even fourth definitions (depending on the dictionary) of sympathy, which move from "feelings of" to "sharing understanding" or even "agreeing with."
Uh-oh. Can you see where the the use of the wrong word can cause a problem for young, newbie writers yet? Or even for more experienced authors? The problem is that while empathy means understanding a character's perspective, sympathy means agreeing with it.
So, Empathy would be knowing which knocked over lead to our Main Domino to fall over, while Sympathy would be to want the knocked over Main Domino to be righted up.
I think you've got a bit of a circular argument going on there. Being unsympathetic is baked into the idea of a 'villain'. If they're sympathetic, then they're just ... an antagonist, and any unsympathetic antagonist could be called a villain. 'Villain' is just a category of antagonists ... which is one reason I don't much care for the hero/villain terminology, preferring protagonist/antagonist.
No one needs to be wrong for tension. You just need two parties (at least one of them sympathetic) who both want the same thing but can't both have it. (Traditionally, one will try to get/do something, and the other will stop them, but it's best if the conflict can be phrased as both of them competing over the same thing. In a mystery or crime drama, the culprit and the detective fight over whose version of truth will be accepted by society. In a sci-fi, the two might be fighting over whose vision of the future of humanity becomes real. In a romance, it's about whose plan for the future of the relationship will become a reality.) This is why people are entertained by sports, why people will still watch the Superbowl even if neither of the teams playing are their favorite -- there's still clear conflict and tension, even if there isn't a clear good guy/bad guy.
S02E22, Hurricane Fluttershy is a great example.
If you see Fluttershy as the protagonist, then Rainbow is the antagonist, preventing her from doing what she wants (staying home where it's safe).
If you see Rainbow as the protagonist, then Fluttershy is the antagonist, preventing her from breaking the record and impressing Spitfire (and later, preventing her from succeeding in sending the water up at all).
(Note: I would argue that Fluttershy is the protagonist, because she is the one with the real character arc in this episode, with her character growth leading to a resolution of the conflict.)
Neither one of them is a villain, because they're both sympathetic. (Either one could be made into a villain by making them nastier and taking away redeeming traits.) And viewers may well want the best for both of them. Each of them is right in their own way, and the audience might be rooting for either of them. Or both. (at least until the feather flu imperils the water supply)
But there's conflict: they 'fight' over the question of whether or not Fluttershy will participate.
Interestingly enough, Protagonist Fluttershy fails to achieve her goal, which technically makes the episode a tragedy.
But the point is, there's no hero/villain relationship, and both characters are sympathetic ... yet they're still protagonist/antagonist, and there's still conflict, which develops into tension.
Which is all an overly-wordy and over-complicated way of saying:
You shouldn't go making your antagonist deliberately unlikable just because 'the villain shouldn't be sympathetic'. Maybe your antagonist isn't a 'villain' at all.
4779757
Oh good, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who took issue with his tangent about moral relativism, because the fact of the matter is that while taking it to the extreme definitely makes a mess (just like every other simple philosophy), the fundamental point that it is perfectly normal and acceptable for different people to have different values is very valid (it's why I refuse to take a position on a number of political topics). Your example of Hurricane Fluttershy is a perfect example of that because Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash very clearly have radically different personal value systems which play a large part in driving the conflict in that episode, but it refrains from passing judgement on either of them the way this post makes it sound like the narrative is required to, and at the end of the day Rainbow and Fluttershy are great friends in spite of that difference in values.
That said, I think the best example I can think of is the BattleTech universe. Being a wargaming setting, players need to be able to pick any side, and it delivers this with a fantastic execution of shades of grey. There are dozens of factions which all have their own quirks, and at the end of the day there are things to love and hate about every single one of them so players can sympathize with or hate any of them and you can write amazing stories with characters from just about any faction in the protagonist and antagonist roles including characters from the same faction in both. Shades of grey is the norm, and it makes the universe as a whole much stronger and more narratively compelling than a simple black and white setting like Star Wars because even sworn enemies can and do find themselves working together sometimes.
Now, Viking, I don't know if you mis-worded this in an attempt to drive a linguistic point home or if you genuinely believe that there is no merit in more complex stories where there is no clear right and wrong or hero and villain as this post seems to claim, but as written this is the first thing you have posted that I strongly disagree with you on and would flat out call bad advice.
4779757 4779909
You know, in a way I'm kind of relieved? I've been doing Being a Better Writer for four years now, and in all that time I've never had a moment where someone's gone "Hey, I really don't agree with this. I think you voiced it wrong" or whatever, and over the last year, I've become increasingly sure it was bound to happen at some point. It's like the bush-pilot 50,000 miles rule (if I'm recalling that number correctly).
Honestly, I did screw this one up, and reading your comments told me exactly what I did wrong. I took something that was fairly simple and overexplained it. To the point of being confusing. I should have halved the length of this post and kept it more succinct.
I'm definitely not advocating against grey areas (crud, read Colony and tell me which of the two, Admiral West or Rodriguez, is in the right), nor that there aren't stories that have antagonist and protagonist as opposed to hero/villain. I was going for something much simpler: just straight up those who shove moral relativism into everything or mistakenly use "sympathetic villain" in place of "empathetic villain." Crud, I mentioned the topic of this post on the Fimfic Discord channel, and within seconds people were posting about it, and not only using empathetic and sympathetic interchangeably, but getting both of them wrong, one even immediately said that they were a villain was a villain that whose position was right.
I dropped the ball here, guys, and for that I apologize. Both of you definitely went far farther than I intended this post to be read. The point was to clip both the ideas of "all stories need a sympathetic villain" and "sympathetic villains are the ones that are right" because neither of those is correct ... but I totally dropped the ball in explaining it.
Maybe I'll do a rewrite later this week and redo it. Trim it down, come back at it again. Once more, sorry for dropping the ball, I really got you guys taking a subject I'd meant to be kept simple gone far past its scope, and that's my fault for overstating something that I should have known to keep simple.
Still, dropping the ball in four years isn't bad. Kind of glad it's over and done with. I'll see about rewriting this.
4779975
Hey, no problem, mistakes happen. I figured that was the case from your other posts, but the way you wrote this...yeah. Oops.
That said, I'm honestly also glad to see this screwup and especially response from you because I've run into people before who don't usually make major mistakes and seem cool, but then when they really faceplant they respond to criticism like this by attacking the people pointing it out instead of stepping back and taking another look to find their mistake like you did here. I'm very glad to see that you can handle serious criticism like an adult instead of lashing out like a petulant child, and your response to this has substantially increased my respect for you, both as a person and an author.
Just remember in the future that if you are writing substantial advice like this, you should probably assume that people will be giving it serious thought since that's kind of the point and will thus be more likely to spot deeper issues like this than would be the case in an actual story.
4779975
I just had an interesting thought for a really clean way to describe the sane version of the values conflicts behind moral relativism I wanted to toss your way to see if you had any thoughts on it:
Fist, we start with two moral assumptions most people will agree with.
1. Violence is bad.
2. Bullying is bad.
Next, we then add the generally understood statement that if a victim decides to seriously beat the shit out of their bully, the bullying will generally stop. This can be simplified into the statement that, regardless of morality, violence can be an effective way to stop bullying.
This creates a value judgement because one bad thing can be used to stop the other, so a judgement must be made about which one is worse with two possible outcomes.
1. If you think bullying is worse than violence, then it logically follows that violence is an acceptable solution to stop bullies.
2. If you think violence is worse than bullying, then it logically follows that violence is not an acceptable solution to stop bullies.
This creates a situation where it logically follows that two people who agree with both of the original moral points can disagree on the later moral conclusions because of differences in how they weigh those original points.