/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11276579]

How do I write a compelling Villian?

[Anonymous No.11276588]

just impersonate the edgy atheist type of person

[Anonymous No.11276594]

Introduce the villain by gradually into a story.

Then you might incorporate a chapter dedicated to the childhood/upbringing of the villain describing the process how he came to be what he is (currently) in the story. Think of Thomas Harris "Red Dragon" that dedicates few chapters worth to the childhood of the serial killer to make his actions more justifiable in a sense etc.

Just my opinions on the matter.

[Anonymous No.11276603]

write him as a hero and then flip it

[Anonymous No.11276604]

>>11276603
Retard

[Anonymous No.11276612]

Bad guys either have no morality or one that conflicts with society at large.

bad guys, they can say and do whatever they want, sometimes they speak truth, they arent chained by socities rules.

no such thing as absolute evil or good, a bad guy can help a cat from a tree, he loves cats, a good guy can commit a heinous act of violence if he thinks its for the greater good

[Anonymous No.11276666]

>>11276603
Bad guys need to have two things
1. The ability to defend himself from the protagonist's strengths and exploit the protagonist's weaknesses
2. Want the the same thing as the protagonist but with a different method/outcome

[Anonymous No.11276669]

>>11276579
If you are writing a genre work for children and manchildren, writing a villain is easy. The villain should be motivated by base motivations, greed, lust, prejudice (might play well in >current year). The heroes are normally motivated by high ideals to contrast with the villain, or at least better motivations such as love and friendship. However, they shouldn't be completely unrealistic (except in highly fantastical settings). To pick a simplistic example from an overrated book, Umbridge is more compelling than Voldemort, simply because Umbridge is an exaggerated caricature of shitty authority figures while Voldemort is just evil for the sake of it with no believable motivation. Read East of Eden and copy Cathy if you are stuck.

If you want to write more complex villains, you need to humanise them. This doesn't necessarily mean putting a cliche sob story background but having them have multiple competing motivations (Raskolnikov in the first half of C&P is a good example, trying to reconcile his Nietzschian ideals with the human qualities and desire for forgiveness that hold him back)Just because they have shitty aims shouldn't mean that they are incompetent and banal characters. Humbert Humbert doesn't have a particularly sympathetic story and is clearly a terrible person, but half the readers get misled because of his skill of using language. If your villains are ideologically motivated, make sure you actually know a non-strawman version of the ideology (like if they are fascists, actually read Evola and have the villains make the most convincing pro-fascism arguments possible).

[Anonymous No.11276674]

The best antagonists are heroes of their own story, whose objectives are the same as your protagonist while trying to achieve them through polar opposite means.

[Anonymous No.11276688]

>>11276579
Make sure that the villain isn't "evil" just for the sake of it. You don't have to necessarily make the villain sympathetic or even empathetic, just make it so there's at least a logical or understandable reason as to why the villain ended up the way they were. Also, the villain shouldn't genuinely believe that what they're doing is bad.

[Anonymous No.11276700]

>>11276604
>Retard
No - this is solid. The reality is that there are few true villains. Mostly what we see as villains are just the protagonists on the other team. The man that wreaks destruction on your people is a believable character when he is revealed to be working towards providing for his own people - your destruction being only a necessary sidenote. Remember also that "villain" is derived from "villein". The perception of the evil nature of the subject in question is founded in the fact that he lies outside of your group. Pic somewhat related.

[Anonymous No.11276704]

>>11276579
Think of the banality of evil.
Think or describe of someone you know in real life, what makes him tick?

[Anonymous No.11276707]

>>11276700
Being the protagonist of the other team doesn't also mean that he's another hero.

[Anonymous No.11276714]

>>11276579
Choose either the sympathetic villain or the incomprehensible villain.

[Anonymous No.11276729]

>>11276579
Your question does not have enough information to warrant writing a compelling answer.

[Anonymous No.11276730]

Make the villain competant, but with genuine struggles and motives, and suffer from being unlucky.

[Anonymous No.11276750]

My villain has motives that are arguably better than the protagonists
He just manipulates and uses people as he pleases to accomplish his goals

[Anonymous No.11276777]

>>11276729
Why not?

[Anonymous No.11276779]

>>11276750
Think of all the great villains in literature; does this apply to any of them?

[Anonymous No.11276780]

>>11276750
Whoa, careful with that Edge

[Anonymous No.11276791]

>>11276779
no
>>11276780
no

[Anonymous No.11276794]

What do you need a villain for?

[Anonymous No.11276796]

read my diary desu

[Anonymous No.11276802]

>>11276794
so people can write villainxhero fanfiction on tumblr

[Anonymous No.11276836]

You make him right and then have the hero attack him.

[Anonymous No.11276852]

>>11276794
Every story has a villain

[Anonymous No.11276915]

pretend you're writing a script for Javier Bardem

[Anonymous No.11276918]

>>11276579

Explain why he does evil stuff or do not explain it at all.

[Anonymous No.11277081]

bump

[Anonymous No.11277167]

>>11276688
>or even empathetic
I don't think this means what you think it means.

[Anonymous No.11277310]

>>11276852
Quite wrong, every GOOD story has a CONFLICT.
Keep in mind, you don't necessarily need it to be a villain, conflict can present itself in countless ways.

[Anonymous No.11277319]

>>11277310
>having a conflict without a villain
the mental gymnastics are amazing

[Anonymous No.11277347]

>>11276579
realise that there are no villains

[Anonymous No.11277354]

>>11277319
>natural disaster
>internal problems
>making dumb or just misjudged decisions
>having to decide basically anything without knowing the end outcome
Majority of people never encounter any villains in their lives and still experience quite a bit conflict.

[Anonymous No.11277364]

>>11277310
Provide 3 examples

[Anonymous No.11277370]

>>11277354
>natural disaster
enemy:disaster, nature
>interla probems
enemy: internal
>decisions
enemy: maker
>decide
enemy: decider

[Anonymous No.11277393]

>>11276579
The only quality that matters is them being entertaining. And there are almost infinite ways too achieve that, they can be completely inhumane and evil for the keks (harder to pull of), or basically a hero of their own story with better reasoning than the protagonist.

>>11276669
Voldy isn't evil, he is amoral and ambitious. An evil character does evil for the sake of doing evil, he's just a pussy that's afraid to die.

Also most fascist didn't read Evola, so it's not necessary for them to know shit about the ideology, beyond things that make genuinely sense in their head. Adolf himself wasn't big on learning either and just lucked his way in.

[Anonymous No.11277406]

>>11277370
That'd be an antagonistic force at best. A villain is a role for a fucking person.

[Anonymous No.11277471]

A villain is a failed hero.

Write a hero, then imagine some critical moment (the climax of his story) where shit didn't go his way, and it broke him and turned him into the villain.

If you're a really good writer, this will happen in parallel with the main character, making the villain not obvious until the pivotal moment where his "break" lines up with the climax of the story.

[Anonymous No.11277486]

I believe a villain should be more than just a villain. His personality shouldn't rely entirely on his goals, which would simply be those opposing the protagonist. He needs to be human first and foremost; give them an identity they can call their own rather than being a satellite to the hero's. I'm not saying that villains whose entire existence revolves around their enemy can't be good; it can work excellently if done efficiently. But something as simple as giving your villain a favorite drink, to have them talk differently depending on who they are speaking to, to bestow upon them character traits that are not socially seen as evil, such as politeness, diligence, or even flaws that any heroic person could have.
Again, this is just applied to a grounded in reality villain; if you want to make them inhuman caricatures with the sole purpose of defying the hero you can do that, but you need to be committed to that vision rather than flip flopping between human and monstrous, because it can very easily backfire.

[Anonymous No.11277487]

>>11277471
And I don't mean gay shit like the Joker and going insane by "break", I mean for example someone who held himself out to be loved and was rejected and the experience warped him subtly so that he has a different perspective on relationships that leads him into conflict with the main character.

The "break" doesn't have to make him evil or mad, it just has to be the point where he changed into a person who would inevitably be drawn into conflict with the main character in the circumstances of the story. Seeing as the main character is usually good this means the "break" is usually something traumatic to explain why the villain is "bad" but it doesn't have to be.

Maybe you're writing some gay slice of life drama and the main character wants to start a community vegetable patch but the big bad property developer wants to turn it into a parking garage or something. Your villain should have some point in his past where he broke, which is why he's not on the main character's team. Something should have happened to him that made him see the world differently.

This isn't how it happens in real life - your worldview is generally the culmination of your entire life experience and not overly affected by just one single event, even if some events do loom large - but it is dramatic, and makes for good villains. A good villain is someone who had an internal conflict and lost it.

[Anonymous No.11277521]

>>11277487
Final addendum:
A great villain is someone who has an internal conflict and is losing it during the story, and loses it at the critical dramatic moment to parallel the protagonist's own development. A villain who is a mirror for the protagonist, in a sense, which explains why the protagonist's internal struggle is so important.

If the villain fails because of his own flaws that's even better, and what makes him so hateable. People can pity weakness, but they can also really fucking hate it. If the villain fails because of something external then that gives him an excuse. If his failure is all him - the odds intimidating but not foregone; the mountain tall but not insurmountable - then his tragic struggle becomes despicable instead of futile.

[Anonymous No.11277555]

>>11277487
The Joker is a good villain though. Not because he's crazy but because he knows how to correctly attack the protagonist (by using his disdain for killing against him) and he is fighting for the same thing that Batman is (the "soul" of Gotham) which puts them in conflict

[Anonymous No.11277645]

>>11276579
read my diary desu

[Anonymous No.11277667]

>>11276669
Is Raskolnikov really an antagonist though?

[Anonymous No.11277678]

>>11277667
nvm we're talking about villains not antagonists

[Anonymous No.11277715]

> all i did was to try to make my villain so likebile that at the end his death should even have a negative effect on the reader, like kind of his death to be more of a sad end than a triumph of the protagonist
>mfw i actually almost made it
>mfw i am about to write the last chapter where my fellow "villain" will be killed by his own brother

[Anonymous No.11277733]

>>11277645

[Anonymous No.11277864]

>>11276707
Well it depends on what you define as a hero. In the case we're discussing it certainly does, because it was stated as being so.

[Anonymous No.11278036]

bump

[Anonymous No.11278148]

>>11276579
You can't.

[Anonymous No.11278572]

>>11278148
based You can't poster

[Anonymous No.11278642]

>>11277521
You sound like a piece of trash.

[Anonymous No.11278787]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Fran%C3%A7ois_Vidocq

Just take this guy, put him in the right narrative context, and change his name somewhat.

[Anonymous No.11278895]

>>11276579
By not being stereotypical. Especially with protagonists. Characters are never simple.

[Anonymous No.11279003]

I like villains who are objectively more likable than the protagonist. Grey morality is also very fun.

[Anonymous No.11279044]

We live in a society

[Anonymous No.11279135]

>>11276779
ozymandias

[Anonymous No.11279153]

>>11279135
Ozymandias's motives were the same as the heroes

[Anonymous No.11279190]

>>11276579
Personally, make him right. At least make him so validated you can't help but see why he truly believes he's right. That is if you want him to be relatable rather than a force of nature or pure evil.

>>11276612
>>11276669
These are just other examples or types of villains. A villain doesn't need to be the outsider at all.

>>11277715
This is the goal IMO. A villain usually has to die and unless you're writing a power fantasy that should be their climactic kick in the nuts to the protagonist and reader.

[Anonymous No.11279199]

>>11276579

Make him the good guy in retrospect

[Anonymous No.11279311]

>>11276604
it's a nice exercise for creativity, like that screenwritters trick, changing good guys to the bad guys from major movies. you just flip the perspective and check what nice ideas it brings.

[Anonymous No.11279413]

>>11276588
>compelling

[Anonymous No.11279716]

Your high school bully

[Anonymous No.11279806]

>>11279716
I wasn't bullied

[Anonymous No.11280123]

>>11276666
listen to satan, but also
>the protagonist's strengths have no effect on the villain
think of batman and the joker in the dark knight. Batman can use his brute strength and ability to strike fear into people, but the joker doesn't care about being hurt because he knows batman won't kill him and he's not scared of him either.

[Anonymous No.11280255]

>>11277364
Butcher's Crossing, John Williams
Nausea, Satre
The Outsider, Camus
All Quiet on The Western Front, EMR
Voss, Patrick White
Dead Souls, Gogol
One Day in the Life--
The Death of--
Journey Into the Past, Zweig

Like there are so many fucking examples...

[Anonymous No.11280451]

>>11278642
And you sound like someone who sympathises with school shooters.

If you're too weak to carry your load and decide that the solution to this problem is not to get stronger, nor to pick a different load, but to lash out at the world, then you're a narcissistic, self-absorbed piece of shit.

And that makes for a really, really hateable villain. I'm not saying it's not tragic, but "anyone would fail in his situation" means that nothing's really the villain's fault - he's a victim of circumstance. Having the villain fail at the test that the protagonist succeeds at gives him complexity without making him overly sympathetic. Nobody will pity him, but they will understand him.

[Anonymous No.11282012]

bump

[Anonymous No.11282096]

>>11276579

By not trying to make him be one.

[Anonymous No.11282525]

>>11282096
How?

[Anonymous No.11282545]

>>11282525

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody sets out to be the bad guy. A compelling villain is someone who isn't aware that he's a villain. Try writing from that perspective.