Why are the bad guys always so good?
Sitting here at the laptop, one ear on Radio 5 Live for the last of this week's Premiership games, I figured it was high time I posted something of interest on the blog.
Last week or so the Telegraph published a Top 50 Villains of Literature supplement, and interesting reading it made too (here's the link by the way). Together with the fact that one of my favourite shows restarts this week, Heroes, bearing the season title 'Villains', it seemed an auspicious time to discuss the subject of bad guys and why they always seem to be so darn cool...
We all love a villain. It's one of those truisms that pervades throughout literature, movies, TV and all media. Villains, you see, are not as white-on-white or, dare I say, as two-dimensional as heroes. Shades of grey, even black, are always preferable to pearly white. Villains can be uncompromising, inscrutable; they can break the rules, walk their own path and stick two fingers up to the bastions of law and order, of conformity.
Let's face it, villains get to do the things, we, as law-abiding, good-natured citizens, would always quite like to do. Being bad, even just a little bit, is a thrill. Villains get to do this with impunity, often with aplomb, occasionally even with humour. They're usually powerful too - and power is attractive. Villains are the id to the heroes' superego. Heroes are all 'don't do that, you shouldn't do that, that's wrong'. Whereas villains are all 'you shouldn't do that, that's wrong, so do it'.
Villains realise the subconscious desires that dwell within most of us - after all, we are only human. Plus they tend to dress in black... and who doesn't look good in black, right?
It's worth celebrating these nefarious characters, who we love to hate, or hate to love. Who didn't dig the Joker in Dark Knight or the Killing Joke or Dark Knight Returns? There's just something pervertedly appealing about a guy who can act like a total amoral, entrophic lunatic with a smile on his face and a song in his heart.
Who doesn't agree Darth Vader is the daddy and unmitigatingly cool? Come on, admit it, you wanted him to ice that insipid Luke Skywalker. Oh, and he's about the only character who seems to be prevalent in pretty much all the best incarnations of the franchise. Ever watch Smallville? Lex and Lionel Luther, the dastardly and unscrupulous industry tycoons/megalomaniacs, are the best damn thing on that show (forget Tom Welling, wearing Clark Kent's red jumper; slick-suited, slick-headed Michael Rosenbaum is totally the man).
The list could go on and on.
Taking a more highbrow tack, the Telegraph has some classic choices in their literary catalogue of neer-do-wells: Hannibal Lector (he's a sociopathic cannibal, but you just couldn't help but root for him in Silence of the Lambs, right? I wonder if that's what Robert Harris intended when he created him?). Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, who himself isn't exactly pure as driven snow) features in the list too, and highlights for me the importance of having a good villain to test our oft eponymous hero - a yin to our champion's yang, the thing that by being his or her opposite, defines him.
Captain Hook, Moby Dick, Sauron, Patrick Batemen: whether it's malfeasant pirates, indomitable white whales, demi-god like tyrants or self-obsessed psychopaths, villains in all their shapes and sizes are compelling. They represent fear incarnate, and this too is thrilling; less so the vicarious, cathartic experience of being a villain and moreover the oh-so-slightly masochistic experience of being victim to one, albeit through the safety of your own living room/easy chair. Horror as a genre has been predicated on this desire since its outset and has some great villains (Christopher Lee as Dracula, anyone? Gary Oldman single-handedly redeeming the otherwise turgid modern version of Stoker's classic in the same role?)
All the most memorable heroes have good villains as their counterparts. A hero isn't a hero if he doesn't have something to fight against. Sure this could be amorphous: world hunger, natural disasters, drug abuse (check out the 70's and 80's era of DC and Marvel comics for a truckload of this type of thing), but isn't it so much more interesting if it's an individual that represents and articulates all of that negativity? One man (or woman, of course) that is the threat that will not think twice about sacrificing a bus load of school kids or a hospital brimming with patients. It's horrifying; it's compelling.
Good villains are sometimes hard to come by. They are just as important, if not more important than the heroes. Good is defined by evil, and visa versa. It's all part of the same equation really.
Personally, I love villains. For a start, they are so much more fun to write about than heroes. The shackles are off, and the challenge is: how can I make them as horrific as possible? How can I do this in such a way that appalls but entices with equal measure. The trick is to make them bad, but not so bad that they can't be identified with, that the villain acts so egregiously that you lose all interest.
It's a balancing act of course, one that treads a thin line, akin to the line between good and evil.
Last week or so the Telegraph published a Top 50 Villains of Literature supplement, and interesting reading it made too (here's the link by the way). Together with the fact that one of my favourite shows restarts this week, Heroes, bearing the season title 'Villains', it seemed an auspicious time to discuss the subject of bad guys and why they always seem to be so darn cool...
We all love a villain. It's one of those truisms that pervades throughout literature, movies, TV and all media. Villains, you see, are not as white-on-white or, dare I say, as two-dimensional as heroes. Shades of grey, even black, are always preferable to pearly white. Villains can be uncompromising, inscrutable; they can break the rules, walk their own path and stick two fingers up to the bastions of law and order, of conformity.
Let's face it, villains get to do the things, we, as law-abiding, good-natured citizens, would always quite like to do. Being bad, even just a little bit, is a thrill. Villains get to do this with impunity, often with aplomb, occasionally even with humour. They're usually powerful too - and power is attractive. Villains are the id to the heroes' superego. Heroes are all 'don't do that, you shouldn't do that, that's wrong'. Whereas villains are all 'you shouldn't do that, that's wrong, so do it'.
Villains realise the subconscious desires that dwell within most of us - after all, we are only human. Plus they tend to dress in black... and who doesn't look good in black, right?
It's worth celebrating these nefarious characters, who we love to hate, or hate to love. Who didn't dig the Joker in Dark Knight or the Killing Joke or Dark Knight Returns? There's just something pervertedly appealing about a guy who can act like a total amoral, entrophic lunatic with a smile on his face and a song in his heart.
Who doesn't agree Darth Vader is the daddy and unmitigatingly cool? Come on, admit it, you wanted him to ice that insipid Luke Skywalker. Oh, and he's about the only character who seems to be prevalent in pretty much all the best incarnations of the franchise. Ever watch Smallville? Lex and Lionel Luther, the dastardly and unscrupulous industry tycoons/megalomaniacs, are the best damn thing on that show (forget Tom Welling, wearing Clark Kent's red jumper; slick-suited, slick-headed Michael Rosenbaum is totally the man).
The list could go on and on.
Taking a more highbrow tack, the Telegraph has some classic choices in their literary catalogue of neer-do-wells: Hannibal Lector (he's a sociopathic cannibal, but you just couldn't help but root for him in Silence of the Lambs, right? I wonder if that's what Robert Harris intended when he created him?). Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, who himself isn't exactly pure as driven snow) features in the list too, and highlights for me the importance of having a good villain to test our oft eponymous hero - a yin to our champion's yang, the thing that by being his or her opposite, defines him.
Captain Hook, Moby Dick, Sauron, Patrick Batemen: whether it's malfeasant pirates, indomitable white whales, demi-god like tyrants or self-obsessed psychopaths, villains in all their shapes and sizes are compelling. They represent fear incarnate, and this too is thrilling; less so the vicarious, cathartic experience of being a villain and moreover the oh-so-slightly masochistic experience of being victim to one, albeit through the safety of your own living room/easy chair. Horror as a genre has been predicated on this desire since its outset and has some great villains (Christopher Lee as Dracula, anyone? Gary Oldman single-handedly redeeming the otherwise turgid modern version of Stoker's classic in the same role?)
All the most memorable heroes have good villains as their counterparts. A hero isn't a hero if he doesn't have something to fight against. Sure this could be amorphous: world hunger, natural disasters, drug abuse (check out the 70's and 80's era of DC and Marvel comics for a truckload of this type of thing), but isn't it so much more interesting if it's an individual that represents and articulates all of that negativity? One man (or woman, of course) that is the threat that will not think twice about sacrificing a bus load of school kids or a hospital brimming with patients. It's horrifying; it's compelling.
Good villains are sometimes hard to come by. They are just as important, if not more important than the heroes. Good is defined by evil, and visa versa. It's all part of the same equation really.
Personally, I love villains. For a start, they are so much more fun to write about than heroes. The shackles are off, and the challenge is: how can I make them as horrific as possible? How can I do this in such a way that appalls but entices with equal measure. The trick is to make them bad, but not so bad that they can't be identified with, that the villain acts so egregiously that you lose all interest.
It's a balancing act of course, one that treads a thin line, akin to the line between good and evil.
posted by Nick Kyme at
17:04
4 Comments:
Hey Nick, a fine expose on the virtues of villainy!
I've yet to get a hold of "Assault on Black Reach", but the extract alone was quite enticing. I trust work progresses well on the Salamanders?
It's with that in mind I'd comment about villainy. There's the loveable category (middle ground?) of the anti-hero, someone who's a bit murky and off-white. Could you think of any 'pure heroes' who themselves are really more captivating than those surrounding them? I fear my only suggestion in that regard is Hiro Nakamura.
Similarly, have you much in mind (that can be expanded on without doing a 'big reveal') for exploring the 'heroism' of the Salamanders? What sort of villains have you lined up for them?
I'm not sure how familiar you are with "Death World"(the 40k one), but a remarkable aspect of a genuinely good book was that the 'villain' was...well...a bit amorphous. Sure, there were orks up to no good, but they were never really a credible threat to our heroes.
Would you say there is much scope for expanding 40k fiction towards the non-entity foe (e.g. Chaos) and portraying it well within a single series? I.e. to display Chaos as 'the villain' but in such a way that it's even less concrete and combatable than the likes of global warming, pollution or drugs but without there being any particular 'chief villain'?
I suppose the question really is: Though there's a strong attraction of having a Magnificent Bastard (or other delicious fiend) of a villain, how feasible/difficult do you think it is to create an excellent hero/protaganist who are themselves quite a memorable character?
(In that regard, I guess, there's surely a lot of room to explore the stoic inner battles of Salamanders and any faith they have in the manner of some sort of philosophical/religious fiction more than SF or Fantasy? In small amounts, of course...)
Right, that was quite a ramble. Will you be contributing material to "Tales of Heresy" or is it an editor-only job?
My thanks, Xisor - always nice for a blog post to generate some debate.
Work is going very well on Salamanders - I plan to do a post on this very subject at the weekend, once I've got a few more words under my belt for the short story. And as for 'Assault on Black Reach', I do hope you check it out - I think you'd enjoy it.
Villains for the Salamanders, eh? Yes, of course, I do have plans for several villains in the short story and the following novel, some not as obvious as others. They might not be what fans are expecting, but will certainly throw some curve balls at the protagonists. I want the Salamanders to be challenged on not just a physical level, but a mental and moral level too.
I don't want to go into too much detail (I'll save a bit for the blog post), as it'll spoil things - suffice it to say, the villains in the short story 'Fires of War' WILL feature in the novel...
I liked you general comments about villains and villainy; you touch on some very intriguing and thought-provoking issues.
The anti-hero is an interesting one, worthy of a post and a list in his or her own right. Can't say, for me at least, that I'd describe them as villains though - they are a whole other category, all their own.
For me, some of my favourite heroes are, in fact, anti-heroes: Batman, the Punisher, Hellboy, Constantine, Preacher, Wolverine etc.
And amorphous villains are an interesting one. I have read 'Death World', and it's handled pretty well in that book, but the 'enemy' (i.e. the death world itself) still retains an element of sentience, of personality and character. I still believe, however, that it's the evil personified that makes the best villains, the 'Magnificent Bastard' as you put it (I like that - it's oddly catchy...). Aliens for instance has a fairly amorphous horde of deadly lifeforms chewing up and shredding the hapless, luckless colonial marines but it's the big mother than everyone remembers and that showdown with Ripley in the power loader. She, the alien queen, represents the combined horror of the horde; she's the apex of their threat articulated beautifully in the form of a scary, bad-ass beastie. Saying that though, it's unlikely that she or her horrifying progeny would ever appear in a list of greatest villains. What about Titanic or 28 Days Later - pretty memorable films, but the villains not so much.
As for expanding the scope, sure Chaos as a non-entity enemy is a pretty cool subject, and one that good be explored to great effect. As a one-off it's quite compelling, but a tangible villain through which the purposes and deeds of Chaos can be realised is much more interesting as it's tempered by emotion, ambition, hubris and all those other 'human' qualities that I can relate to.
Perhaps a marrying of the two is the ultimate villain. After all, at the top of the Telegraph's villains list was Satan, from Paradise Lost, a figure whose influence can be felt and articulated in an amorphous fashion.
The hero debate is an interesting one, too, and perhaps answered in my earlier point about anti-heroes, but fertile ground for a follow-up blog post too (by way of counterpoint to this one).
Oh, and you're quite right, Salamanders make for intensely intriguing heroes. Humanitarianism aside, there's a lot, as heroes, they have to deal with and reconcile themselves with. For instance, how does a hero deal with the fact that his appearance is likely to scare the crap out of most of the innocents they are trying to save? Their resolute nature in the face of impossible odds is also perfect material for any hero. They are intriguing characters, that's for sure, and I am getting a lot out of devising them - their flaws too (because every good hero should have a flaw of some sort - and before anyone pushes the panic button, I'm not talking Chaos taint or anything like that, just good real issues that heroes might have to go through and face if they existed in this uncompromising form in the real world).
And 'Tales of Heresy', just to draw this lengthy comment to a close, is purely an editorial role for me. I reckon I'd like to try and find my own way with 40K and the Salamanders before I'm ready to join the big boys on the Heresy.
I find it interesting that you've mentioned iconic (though, not necessarily engaging) heroes in a previous post and now great villains, while the GW universes don't ever really share their characters. The authors make their own: the Blood Pact, Honsou, Thanquol, Mitchell, Darkblade... unlike (say) Batman's Rogues Gallery, it doesn't really allow someone to come along and throw a new angle on a character. One story I read about only recently involved the question: what would happen if Two-Face's coin consistently landed "good" side up? Is there an equivalent tale a new WHFB/40K writer could submit, giving Kharn or Archaon a new angle? Or do even trusted BL authors have to keep them iconic?
One reason villains work is, they act. Iconically, the relationship seems to be that the world works quite happily until the villain acts, and the hero has to react until the scheme is foiled and it's all better again. One of the reasons I dislike older comic books is the "hobbies" the heroes got up to inbetween villainous moments - opening hospitals, attending charity days, breaking world records and so on... things which other (non-costumed) people always seemed to organise, as though the hero never had an agenda of their own.
Maybe that's changed of late. I don't read many comics series; what little Superman I read generally involves him associating with superhuman figures, both heroes and villains. Other worlds, deific plots, stories involving the Justice League and similar. I can't remember the last time I saw Clark Kent in normal attire (Wonder Woman referring to Superman as Clark doesn't really count). I know Superman is iconic - he stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way (and sometimes all three at the same time), and he perhaps also stood for the fantasy of readers that they too might imagine a secret identity where they had powers and were famous and cheered for... but I can't engage with the character, because he doesn't seem to work on a human level.
I read a bit more Batman - recently picked up City of Crime, which is great - and he does deal with a lot more urban, basic, non-costumed antics, in the course of his crusade. The writers maintain an agenda for him, in costume, not requiring the Joker to be in sight - though, the villains are of a far more human level, too. I can't help but notice that the evil genius Lex Luthor isn't on the Top 50, but the Joker is number 23 - I agree, the Luthors of Smallville are wonderfully portrayed, but I don't think Superman's ever had a villain who could be considered an equal/opposite in some way.
It's also a matter of consequences - Barbara Gordon and the Joker. What permenant effect of that level has any other villain inflicted upon a hero? Superman survived Doomsday, Batman survived Bane, but Oracle will never be Batgirl again.
It's not just a DC thing - this is why I like the X-Men, and sometimes like Spidey, but can't understand Captain America or the Fantastic Four. The X-Men continue to have a cause outside of whichever codenamed villain they're facing at the time, and I think their best stories are when they include the non-codenames, and when the list of the dead in a story is memorable for characters who didn't exist before the tale started.
I think it's a balance of power and limitation. A hero can't be contested unless the villain grapples with the hero's weakness, a limitation the hero must somehow overcome. Sometimes the characteristic is bravery or skill and the hero must become better or simply make the decision to stand up and do something. In the case of Batman, Jack Bauer, Rorschach and whoever, their willpower is already absolute and their code unyielding, but they're limited by factors such as trust, or the simple problem of only being able to stop one problem at a time.
It might even be simpler than that. The attractive characters are the ones who, at the start of the story, have already started what they're doing in relation to the crisis. The agenda is fully formed, perhaps underway. It's one reason why you can start a movie or novel in the middle of an action sequence. It's also why Doctor Who's format works so well - the TARDIS always appears right in the middle of events happening, the Doctor doesn't have to endure the weeks or years the villain spent setting everything up...
Everyone else simply hasn't been caught up in events yet, hasn't picked sides yet, and is analogous to the ordinary reader who still needs a cup of coffee to get going in the morning. The villain already has a plan, and knows what he's doing with the day - wasn't that decisive!
"For instance, how does a hero deal with the fact that his appearance is likely to scare the crap out of most of the innocents they are trying to save?"
Hehe, keep their helmets on!
On a more serious note I find the concept of changes intriguing as the villain becomes the hero and the hero the villain and in between there is a third character step thrown in, the victim.
Stephen Donaldson is teh master of the villain-victim-hero transitions and it can make for some really fun reading and turns of eventa.
Another villain theme not so frequently used (sad since it is imo the best way to show of the grey areas of villain-hood) is the "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" concept.
This is perfectly adaptable to chaos as chaos is just as much about infighting as in battling order. The minor chaos god of Malal comes to mind foremost but even if we skip that one this prospect can open a whole can of good stories as loyal marines could very well under certain circumstances ally with the enemy to their enemy.
This is also the single most powerful tool of challenging the heroes morale in a story.
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