Villains

I’ve been thinking a lot about villains this week.  

I’m writing a big fantasy story that needs a great villain.  And I’m completely stuck on it.

As I conceive of him now, my villain is power-hungry.  He wants to enslave humanity.  Simply because he is selfish and wants the power and can do it if no one stops him.

When I explained the villain’s plan to my partner, he said, “Sounds a little Voldemort-y.”  That was not meant as a compliment.

I think right now we tend to value villains with motivations that make sense. 

Malthusianism has been used a lot to justify a villain’s actions lately.  Richmond Valentine in The Kingsmen and Thanos in The Avengers are two examples.  Killing half of the world’s population isn’t the right solution to climate change, but you can logically understand how these villains might arrive at this conclusion.

The greatest villain in recent memory is Black Panther’s Killmonger.  At times you wonder if he isn’t the hero.  His anger is justified.  How could he not be angry?

For years, I have believed this to be true- the more the audience can understand why the villain is doing what they’re doing, the better and more interesting the story.  Even Dan Brown summarizes this succinctly in his Masterclass (I admit I am a Masterclass dabbler): “Every villain needs to have his own morality.  If a villain spends part of the novel killing people, you need to give him or her believable reasons for doing so.  Make the reader understand exactly what desperation or belief has driven him to it.”

Voldemort represents a cliched villain to my partner because Voldemort doesn’t have a consistent reason for what he’s doing or what he wants.  He wants power because he wants it.  He wants to construct differences in those weaker than him to consolidate that power.  He sits in dark castles and plots how to take over the world.  Muahahahaha. 

But what if selfish, greedy, purely “evil” villains are the only thing that make sense to me now?  There is a pure, hungry evil in the world, and it is far scarier to me than a logical villain.

I didn’t viscerally understand this five years ago, but I see now that the fight against evil is never over and that the opponent cannot be logically reasoned with.  Power is the belief.  I don’t need to understand why the racist, capitalist villain does racist things.  They are not justifiable.  It’s not based in something psychological that their parents did to them when they were kids.  The system we live in produces some selfish people and that system helps them consolidate power by oppressing others and that is evil.*

Do justified villains and purely evil villains come in and out of fashion depending on how close we are to the precipice of totalitarianism?  I suppose Sauron would say yes.

I’m worried that if I make my villain a bigoted, power-hungry, selfish monster that he will read cliched, or one-dimensional, or hack.  But right now, that feels like the only villain I can write.  Has anyone else been struggling with their villain?  Do you think we’ll see a change in our villains to more pure evil in the coming years?  

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*(Killmonger was such a great villain because he knew this.  He may belong in his own very special villain category.  I hope one day I will be a good enough writer to find a villain even nearly as good.)