For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad.
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For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
What motivates them? What does their inner life look like? WTF are they thinking when they do evil shit?
Arthur C. Clarke wrote my favorite villain of all time, HAL 9000. HAL has no inner life, and is just a computer trying to resolve conflicting instructions given to it by humans. HAL is creepy because he's human-like, has a human voice with warm tonality, and emulates human psychology. Yet it's a cold, unfeeling machine gone awry, the unintentional consequences of vibe coding. #AI
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For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes I agree 100%. You should hate your villains as much as you want the readers to (which should be a lot because they’re villains!)
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For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
I always read this as the villain *believing* themselves to be a hero. They boast of things any right thinking person would find terrible. I have a few "redeemable" ones, but most aren't and don't want to be. The MC and others regard them with disdain and, on the occasions where they attempt to justify themselves, they are shown to engage in aberrant thinking. They may *think* themselves a hero or the victim but are obviously not & things don't end well for them.
-
For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes Yeah I'm so frustrated by this trend. I love some moral complexity, but very few writers are able to pull it off and what happens instead is just "people were mean to [villain] in the past" being an excuse for them to commit atrocities. Or "the villain was just pretending to be mean and actually wanted the hero to win".
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I always read this as the villain *believing* themselves to be a hero. They boast of things any right thinking person would find terrible. I have a few "redeemable" ones, but most aren't and don't want to be. The MC and others regard them with disdain and, on the occasions where they attempt to justify themselves, they are shown to engage in aberrant thinking. They may *think* themselves a hero or the victim but are obviously not & things don't end well for them.
@crcollins Same. The villain doesn't need to be *likeable* just to not make them a cardboard cut-out evil incarnate on the page.
Even the villain's actions need to make sense and be defensible from the point of view of the villain. That doesn't mean that the protagonist agrees, and it doesn't mean presenting the villain's actions as reasonable.
Unless a parody or maybe children's story, the villain's actions should make sense *for them*. Otherwise they would be doing something else.
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For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place and an awful thing is, no matter how cartoonishly evil you'll paint your villain, some irl billionaire will make a point of one-upping them. -
@crcollins Same. The villain doesn't need to be *likeable* just to not make them a cardboard cut-out evil incarnate on the page.
Even the villain's actions need to make sense and be defensible from the point of view of the villain. That doesn't mean that the protagonist agrees, and it doesn't mean presenting the villain's actions as reasonable.
Unless a parody or maybe children's story, the villain's actions should make sense *for them*. Otherwise they would be doing something else.
Agreed. Your villain has different assumptions. But within those assumptions, what they do must make sense.
@mkj @crcollins @afreytes -
Agreed. Your villain has different assumptions. But within those assumptions, what they do must make sense.
@mkj @crcollins @afreytesI am sorry.
But no.
Again...
I do not want to have any sort of connection with the villain. Nor should any of my readers.
No. They shouldn't even need to make sense.
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I am sorry.
But no.
Again...
I do not want to have any sort of connection with the villain. Nor should any of my readers.
No. They shouldn't even need to make sense.
The chilling aspect of villains, to me, is how any one of us could fall into that trap under certain circumstances. I will say I don't like many of the redemption arcs one encounters in popular media, where a mass murderer is suddenly a good guy when the MC falls in love. You see that a lot in vampire stories, for example. It *might* stem from how uncomfortable people are with pure, unredeemable evil, I don't know. Our religions play up how anyone can be saved.
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The chilling aspect of villains, to me, is how any one of us could fall into that trap under certain circumstances. I will say I don't like many of the redemption arcs one encounters in popular media, where a mass murderer is suddenly a good guy when the MC falls in love. You see that a lot in vampire stories, for example. It *might* stem from how uncomfortable people are with pure, unredeemable evil, I don't know. Our religions play up how anyone can be saved.
@crcollins Well, that, and also how hard it can be to pull yourself out.
Because as the villain, *in your own mind, you're the good bloke!* The people who oppose you just haven't seen the truth yet, they don't realize how perfect the world will be once your vision of what the world should be like is fully in place. Eggs, omelets, meh, cooking's hard.
Doesn't mean it can't be obvious to someone with an outside perspective just how misguided those thoughts and beliefs are.
-
For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes hard agree, give me more pure unadulterated evil villains. I want cartoonist evil villains who are evil just because of it, the redeemable villian has their place but everyone took it too far.
I want more little jack Horners -
For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes Le Guin's *The Word for World is Forest* is a masterpiece on this.
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For someone who yearns to publish a book I believe my writing is pretty bad. So I go read some writing advice and...
Boy...
That stuff about "your villain must be a hero in their story!"
No! FUCK NO!
This is how we end up giving "equal time" to fascists.
Make your villains into villains, stop trying to save or absolve them. Make them triumph not because they deserved it but because others didnt care to stop them. Make them ridiculous, and unlovable. Let your story fuck your villains over.
@afreytes "because others didn't care to stop them" absolutely. And frankly I'm also tired of villains I'm supposed to connect to, or feel sorry for or understand. The ones I've come across in real life are quite beyond me. And frankly their issues aren't ours to carry.
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@afreytes "because others didn't care to stop them" absolutely. And frankly I'm also tired of villains I'm supposed to connect to, or feel sorry for or understand. The ones I've come across in real life are quite beyond me. And frankly their issues aren't ours to carry.
@TheDailyBurble yes, exactly
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@crcollins Well, that, and also how hard it can be to pull yourself out.
Because as the villain, *in your own mind, you're the good bloke!* The people who oppose you just haven't seen the truth yet, they don't realize how perfect the world will be once your vision of what the world should be like is fully in place. Eggs, omelets, meh, cooking's hard.
Doesn't mean it can't be obvious to someone with an outside perspective just how misguided those thoughts and beliefs are.
There may also be differences of opinion as to who constitutes ‘people’.
Some of those vampire stories are pretty sus. @mkj @crcollins @afreytes -
@afreytes "because others didn't care to stop them" absolutely. And frankly I'm also tired of villains I'm supposed to connect to, or feel sorry for or understand. The ones I've come across in real life are quite beyond me. And frankly their issues aren't ours to carry.
@TheDailyBurble @afreytes completely agree!! One of the things I loved about Twin Peaks Season 3 (avoiding major spoilers):
It does not respect its villains. In fact, it actively disrespects them. All their scheming and machinations? They are undone in moments and forgotten
it made me feel INCREDIBLE to see a Big Scary Villain suddenly erased and unmourned. Good riddance!
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