Guy
Inkling
Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig +1 on that! Man, I could rant for pages about that.my least favorite villains are the ones who never die. They fall into a pit of boiling lava at the end of book one, and come book six they're still hanging around, in their tenth reincarnation now, getting more emo and less scary all the time.
I've read a fair amount about serial killers, despots and sexual predators to try and understand evil people, and the concluson I've reached is that when you strip away all the trappings, they really are pathetic people. When you look at what makes an evil person, what motivates him, how he thinks, it inevitably turns out to be something pathetic, childish, and/or petty. Look at the number one example of evil in our time - Hitler. Read his suicide not. If the ideas expressed in it ain't pathetic and childish, I don't know what is. Evil people tend to have enormous egos and pride, to a degree most adults would consider infantile. Just as we want to know what motivates the hero, we want to know what motivates the villain. If he's motivated by some warped sense of morals, he's deceiving himself. He's refusing to face realitity. He's rationalizing, justifying. He's doing wrong and on some deep level he knows it, but he refuses to admit it, even to himself. If you ever read about the gunmen and outlaws of the American West, you'll see a recuring theme of "everyone I killed was in self-defense" or "they all deserved it." Read prison interviews with serial killers. They rarely take responsibility for their actions. I think the source of most - if not all - human evil is self-deception, refusing to honestly look at things, refusing to take responsibility, and someone who does that, regardless of how they dress themselves up, is petty and childish, and a writer developing a villain will ultimately end up at that point. I tend to agree with the criticisms about Anakin's/Vader's character development in the Star Wars prequels. I have a lot of criticisms for those movies in general, but the theme I think Lucas was going for - that underneath all of Vader's black armor and that sinister exterior lurked a truly pathetic individual - I'm totally on board with. I think it's the flip side of developing the hero in such a way was to show his flaws, weaknesses, doubts, etc. I think perfect villains are as boring as perfect heroes. I like to see heroes who, underneath their strong confidant appearances, have doubts and fears and insecurities (as long as they aren't too numerous, else the hero also becomes pathetic) and occasionally makes the wrong choice or takes the wrong course of action. The flip side is villains who, underneath their arrogant, sinister, invincible appearances are really pathetic, weak, frightened people.Ravana said:Same with Digital_Fey's "vague trauma": even if it isn't vague, but precisely and painfully detailed, it's still not an excuse for becoming a villain. For every person who's gone bad because he didn't get a pony for his fifth birthday, there are thousands of (largely) normal people who worked through it and went on to non-villainous lives. So, basically, using this as a device should be a way to indicate how pathetic an individual your villain is, not how (much less why) evil.