Two fantasy questions just for discussion - bad guys and s&s

The other thing is that I've read a lot about the who "sympathetic villain". Is it just me or can't we just have bad bad guys? Sometimes the bad guy just needs to be a selfish such and such who wants it all for his/her self. Yep, there's been some nasty overdoing of stereotypes but that aside... do we need to make our villains sympathetic. IME (and I've worked with no few villains IRL) many are self centered spooky people who lend little of themselves to sympathy.

I enjoy (reading and writing) sympathetic villains. But to me, that doesn't mean that you have to LIKE them--just understand them. Just because a guy/girl is an evil bastard/uh...bastard-ette, doesn't mean they don't have reasons for what they do.

Selfishness alone (just an example) often makes a cardboard cutout of a character. But when you take into account that the phychological companions of that selfishness can be things like extreme insecurity, fear of loss, and the like, they can become quite interesting.

A character trying to kill your wife to save his own son is interesting. A character willing to betray his nation to save the lives of his people is interesting--even when he's wrong and the reader knows it. (That might be a bit cliche, but it makes the point).

This is all just my opinion, of course. I don't really have anything against 'just a bad guy' but I prefer my villains to be just as animated, believable and 3-D as my good guys.

I hope that this doesn't piss off anyone, but I'm going the say it anyway. Hitler really believed that what he was doing was right. Stalin too. So did Pol Pot. They all had reasons. They were all convinced that they were good reasons and the best thing for their countries and people. And, to me, that's what makes what they did so horrifying.

Again, this is just my opinion and based on my own experiences. I have never met someone who does something, evil or not, for no reason. Everyone has reasons whether readily visible or not. And those reasons can be very interesting and create a great deal of passion for or against any character.

Aaaalllll of that being said, I also believe that evil does exist. Sometimes people kill for pleasure. Sometimes people torture simply because it makes them feel powerful. Sometimes people rape just because they like it. But I would be careful with that (and you said it yourself) because it can easily slip into cliche. And still, one could argue that those reasons are still reasons and probably have some terrible (and interesting) trauma beneath them.

flannelberry said:

The other thing is that I've read a lot about the who "sympathetic villain". Is it just me or can't we just have bad bad guys? Sometimes the bad guy just needs to be a selfish such and such who wants it all for his/her self.

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Absolutely. There is real evil in this world. There are people who are irredeemable, vicious beyond comprehension. Serial sex killers, for example, all seem to have two things in common - 1) they enjoy killing people, and 2) they start out by torturing and killing animals as children.

Why they’re this way is a matter of debate, but they walk among us. But if you put such a character into fantasy, people will complain that they’re not real, nobody’s all good or bad, they’re not three dimensional characters. If they’re not, it’s the fault of the writing, not the character conception. Write them as complex, of course. Sympathetic? I don’t think so. I believe in evil and I believe that those who can fight it, must. Coincidentally, so do the characters in my books.

I don't believe that it's necessary that villains be sympathetic, I think it's just necessary that they be well-developed. The two just often go hand-in-hand. All too often--especially sometimes in fantasy--you get nameless, faceless evil that wants to destroy the world just because they do. Sort of generic evil. Like Sauron--he's a big, scary evil figure, but really he is a bit flat as a character. Generic evil makes me think of the villains in cartoons, who go about doing Big Evil Deeds, but we don't see any real complex thought processes behind it. It's good to make your villains fully fleshed out, and often as they get flushed out and we see why they do things they become more sympathetic, but this doesn't have to be the case. Their reasons for being bad can also be bad.

I do agree with kct webber that most evil people believe that what they are doing is right. What makes them evil is that they have a grotesquely distorted vision of what is right. Hitler believed that what he did was right, but Hitler was a tremendous bigot, and Hitler believed in the inherent superiority of the aryan race, and Hitler believed in power. Killing millions of 'inferior' people in order to make himself and his nation powerful was, to him, the right thing to do. Not morally right, but right. To him, it was only what he and his people deserved--and to him, he was giving the jewish people what they deserved. This doesn't make him at all sympathic, at least not to me (but then, I'm a jew ). He was an incredibily, unimaginably evil man. But, in analyzing his motives, we can see that there was more at work than just 'he killed people because he liked to'. And like rugcat said, there are people who are genuinely sadistic, and who genuinely enjoy causing pain. And people who enjoy hating and enjoy dehumanizing others. Throw in that kind of person with some large-scale goals, and you're on your way to a holocaust.

A selfish person genuinely believes that doing anything to get what they want is right. Oh, sure, they know that it may be morally reprehensible, and they know it's not a good thing to do, or a nice thing to do--but they believe that they deserve the things they want, and since their internal perception of the world is run by this belief, anything is justified. Their idea of 'right' is very, very wrong.

Basically, people want well-developed villains. They don't have to be sympathetic. If anything, a well-developed villain can be even more frightening, once you get a look into their twisted minds.

I think the reason why many villians nowadays are more of the "sympathetic" variety is because stock "evil" villians who are evil for the sake of being evil are kind of boring and bland. The bad guys who have good motivations for what they do become more interesting.

One thing I remember hearing was "A good villian never sees themselves as evil." What that means is, from the bad guy's perspective, what he's doing isn't bad at all, he's just doing what needs to be done to achieve his goals.

For example, using Hitler again (keep in mind I'm not trying to say what he did was good, I'm just trying to show why he did what he did), here was a guy who was determined to lead the German people, the "Master Race", to the great glory in which they deserved. In order to do this, he needed to expel the Jews (and later, exterminate them), and Germany needed many resources in order to grow, including raw materials and land.

He brought the Germans out of their depression following the humiliating defeat and peace terms after World War 1 (which stated Germany had to demobilize most of its military, pay the costs for the entire war, and admit guilt for starting the war in the first place. To many Germans, it's like being kicked and then spat upon after you've been knocked down), by rebuilding their economy, military, and giving them a sense of pride and honor in themselves again (when a lot of men aren't working, and then are suddenly working now, you would probably agree that the guy in charge is a good man).

Unfortunately, this "vision" of a Greater Germany would come at a terrible cost. When WW2 began, they passed the "cost" of this high lifestyle onto conquered territories (they started with Jews in Germany, but it wasn't enough to keep up with the demands, and it was because of the increasing costs which led them to war). The Germans would quickly conquer a country via Blitzkrieg, then strip the country of all its materials and wealth, sending it back home. This meant the conquered people were living miserably compared to the Germans, and millions would die as a result.

Another problem was anyone who didn't have the "ideal master race" traits, such as blue eyes and blond hair, were deemed inferior, and were suitable only as slaves, or dead. The Nazi's dealt with communists the same way as they treated Jews, so when they invaded the Soviet Union, they often killed the people they conquered, rather than "liberating them from communism" (as many Russians weren't exactly hardcore followers of Stalin during the outbreak of WW2, but increasingly they felt loyalty to the common cause of repelling the invaders from their homeland). This meant that the Germans would face increasing resistance everywhere, mostly in the Eastern Front, which is where the bloodiest fighting in WW2 was occurring along about a 2,000 mile front (which is roughly from New York to Los Angeles in the US).

Ideology also played on both sides. The Soviet Union wanted to destroy the fascists since they attacked first, and often killed many of their soldiers and civilians. However, as the Soviet Union began to push back the Germans and invade Europe, they often committed terrible atrocities themselves, raping millions of German women, partly out of the frustration that they had to endure from the German military, and also as a psychological weapon; it looks bad on your army if you can't prevent stuff like that from going on (unfortunately it doesn't get talked about much, but it happened regardless of what you believe, or want to believe). And the bombing of civilians by British and American warplanes only stiffened the Germans resolve to defend to the last (Hitler wanted every German to die defending Germany, saying they deserved what was coming to them for not fighting hard enough, but luckily cooler heads prevailed in the end, particularly after he committed suicide).

Again, I don't condone what Hitler did, but when you begin to "study" him, you can start to see some of the underlying reasons why he did what he did. And it's because of things that happened in the aftermath of WW1 why the victors tried to do things differently after WW2 (for instance, helping to rebuild Germany, rather than placing blame entirely on the country and forcing the Germans to pay for everything again). And it's because of the German invasion why the Soviet Union set up the "Iron Curtain", buffer states between themselves and pro-US countries, to prevent another "Operation Barbarossa" from ever happening (and things that happened during the Cold War would affect things going on today, such as the rise of men like Osama Bin Laden, the creation of the Israeli state, and all the conflict going on there today).

So, in short, would you rather read a story about a guy named Hitler who wanted to conquer the world because he was evil for the sake of being evil? Or would you rather read the story of a frustrated painter (yes, Hitler was a painter, and he couldn't get into art school) who saw his country go from great glory to a shameful depression, and vowed to do what he could in order to bring the Germans back to great power and glory again, then backed up his claims by helping his people at the expense of hurting others?

By the way, it's interesting that Joseph Stalin, the guy in charge of the Soviet Union during WW2, was responsible for more deaths than Hitler was (I think some 30 million deaths, at first mostly because of "collective farming", later because he forced Soviet soldiers to fight to the death, lest they risk getting shot by their own forces if they retreated, or their families suffering because of their "cowardice"), yet he's usually portrayed in a good light (classic example of "history is written by the winners", but to be fair, he did bear the brunt of the fighting against the Nazi's during WW2).

You'd be surprised how much information you can find by studying history. Some of the things that happened seems like it came straight out of a story (such as Julius Caesar), but these things really did happen, and there's a ton of info you can draw off of if you need ideas for your own stories (my main antagonist is loosely based on Hitler, for example).

If you want to see even more complex events in history, study the Crusades. There is no clear "good guy" or "bad guy" here, it's all perspective.

For example, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus needed help to reclaim territories he had lost from Seljuk Turks (particularly after the disastrous Battle of Manzikert). He went to Pope Urban II to ask for Western European mercenaries who would help him to reclaim those lands lost (the split between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church had just occurred in 1054, a few decades earlier. To have to even do this was kind of embarassing to the Byzantines).

Pope Urban II, who at the time felt he needed to reassert Papal authority, issued a call to all Christians, and then gave a glamorous story of how infidels had taken the Holy Land and defiled it. He also said it was up to them to free the lands where Christ once preached, lived, and was crucified at, and if they did so, they would receive indulgences which would ensure they'd enter Heaven.

And boy did many people pick this idea up. The Byzantine Emperor just wanted a mercenary force; instead, he got a large army, although they weren't interested in reclaiming lost lands from the Byzantines, they wanted to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, who were deemed infidels. And sure enough, when they reached the city, they sacked it and killed quite a few people there, all in the name of God.

Marxist ideas also got applied. To them, they felt that the Crusaders (particularly the first one) only went because they wanted to get money and lands (and they are partially right, many did go for that reason, and that's probably what most of the Peasant's Crusade, the relatively unorganized crusade right before the First Crusade, consisted of). But recent research shows that Crusading is an expensive undertaking, and many nobles went broke funding the campaigns, so many largely went because of the religious beliefs behind Crusading.

To the Muslims, they viewed these "Franks" (that's the general term they called all Europeans at the time) as hostile invaders of their territory, and had to unite politically first before they could repel these foreigners from their lands. So when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem, he didn't murder everyone in sight like the First Crusade had done. But once he died, his empire split apart pretty quickly (Muslims often hate different factions about as much as they hate non-Muslims, that's why there's all this talk of "faction wars" in Iraq right now), although they did manage to eventually kick out the Crusaders entirely (the last Christian held city, Acre, fell in 1291).

And some Crusades were kind of controversial, such as crusades against fellow Christians such as the Byzantines (during the Fourth Crusade), and others which were more politically motivated than religious, like the Albigensian Crusade. An interesting note I recall my Crusades professor mention was that Lutheranism may not have survived and thrived had the Ottoman Empire not of been a threat to Balkans region which the Holy Roman Emperor had to deal with right away, so he was forced to make peace with the Lutheran faction rather than go to war with them (I suppose that's kind of speculative and a "what if" question, but it's interesting to see how events in the past shape events in the present. But at the time, Lutherans were viewed similarly as the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade, and probably would've been dealt with similarly).

Tellymark--I don't believe that it's necessary that villains be sympathetic, I think it's just necessary that they be well-developed. The two just often go hand-in-hand.

After going back and reading my comment, I think I maybe was a bit unclear about what I meant to say. :c I second Tellymark's statement.

I agree that villains don't have to be sympathetic, but they should definitely be well-developed, imo. I think that whether you choose a sympathetic villain or not depends on the story you're writing and what it needs. There is certainly a place for sympathetic villains, depending on the story you're telling, but if you write a 'Hitler' character, trying to make them sympathetic may not be the best choice--you would probably disgust your reader into tossing your book. He should, however, be well-developed--you should be able to see and know why he does what he does. Villains should disturb. And faceless doesn't do it (at least not for me). I will remember--and shiver at the memory of--your well-develped 'Hitler' character for far longer than I would remember Mr. Faceless No-motive McEvil.

Point of contention?
I have heard people use the term sympathetic (when refering to character development) in this way: Someone with whom the reader can identify. Off the top of my head, I believe it was either Morrell or Orson Scott Card who used the term in that way throughout his entire character development book. I say that for the sake of clarity, because if I've heard this, I imagine that others have as well. Sometimes when people say sympathetic, they mean identifiable, evidently. And for further clarity:
Identlfy psychoanal --to make identification of (oneself) to someone else. [Webster]

I don't think that this implies agreement as does sympathy. Does it?

Whether this spin on the word is right or wrong, I don't know, but I thought it may be useful, or at least of some minor interest.

I've noticed that in the enthusiasm to address the OP's second point about just having bad bad guys, everyone has overlooked his first question, which was, Does anyone write good sword and sorcery? Can it be done?

I myself would like to know the answer to this as I am very old school and love all the S&S of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, et al, and would like to know if anyone currently is writing this kind of stuff.

flannelberry said:

Hi all

I have been pondering going back to fantasy (my first writing love) after a couple of years away. Well, more than pondering, I took out a 10 yo manuscript this week and began fixing it (embarrassing at best, I must say). As I've been working on it and returning to the genre I wondered about a couple of things and would just love to have a purely academic discussion about them; there's few places writers can do this so I thought to post it here.

The first is:
Does anyone write good sword and sorcery? Can it be done? I reread Beowulf recently and some other classics and nothing now compares. Why is that? Is there even a market for it . I'm just curious - I don't write to the market and that's a good thing considering this ms is 10+ yrs old.

The other thing is that I've read a lot about the who "sympathetic villain". Is it just me or can't we just have bad bad guys? Sometimes the bad guy just needs to be a selfish such and such who wants it all for his/her self. Yep, there's been some nasty overdoing of stereotypes but that aside... do we need to make our villains sympathetic. IME (and I've worked with no few villains IRL) many are self centered spooky people who lend little of themselves to sympathy.


Many thanks - I look forward to chatting with the lot of you.

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You can... 10 years ago, or in the YA market.

Fantasy is growing up. Don't be a throwback.

Teraphim said:

You can... 10 years ago, or in the YA market.

Fantasy is growing up. Don't be a throwback.

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Wait. S&S isn't childish. None of those authors I mentioned are children's authors, they are all well-regarded adult authors who wrote very good adventures in the S&S genre.

Maybe you've never read any S&S. I wouldn't call any of it YA or immature.

Good discussion. All I can add is to make sure your villain is motivated to do what he/she does. Power, control, whatever; even if it's simply that they enjoy doing nasty things, that motivation needs to be there.

I believe Hitler knew that what he was doing was evil and just didn't give a damn. I think he hated everyone and everything and was hell bent on destruction. He wanted to kill as many people and destroy as much of civilation as he could. He was evil incarnate. Stalin was a nut case as was Pot. If you are interested in learning more about Stalin and his bloody associates check out "The Black Book of Communism." I guarantee you will have nightmares. After you get into it take a look at the quotes from the founder of the ACLU.

Bad bad guys are too common. I personally like 3 dimensional ones. As for sword and sorcery, that really isnt the bulk of fantasy. In fact, sword and sorcery is minimal compared to all the other subgenres.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Wait. S&S isn't childish. None of those authors I mentioned are children's authors, they are all well-regarded adult authors who wrote very good adventures in the S&S genre.

Maybe you've never read any S&S. I wouldn't call any of it YA or immature.

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i've read more than a few of the authors you recommended. i've written and read more than my fair share of sword and sorcery, but it's more of an exercise in old writing techniques than it is a marketable product.

YA isn't just for kids. It is not a dirty word, or a blow-off. YA is a level of craftsmanship and content that allows for simpler solutions. It's like flirting with disaster instead of embracing ruin.

conan was a long time ago, and r. a. salvatore abandoned his drizzt about ten years ago for his slow fade into literary oblivion.

lots of exciting things have happened since, much of it from england, (and an englishman in minnesota). women-oriented literature has also had their romance/fantasy hybrid revolution. trying to ignore the current market for hybrids isn't going to help anyone write professionally.

but, in all things, if you believe you can write a throwback so good that you can kill a major literary shift, more power to ya.

tschues

I like bad bad guys, but that doesn't mean they can't be interesting or even likable. I mean, Hannible Lector was a very interesting bad guy, yet there was no mistaking that he was evil. I have several characters who are just oozing evil, but it's the slime coating that makes them so much fun as characters.

JBI said:

As for sword and sorcery, that really isnt the bulk of fantasy. In fact, sword and sorcery is minimal compared to all the other subgenres.

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And that depresses me. I grew up during the 70s when S&S WAS fantasy. It was the bulk of what you'd find. The re-edited printings of Conan books by Ace opened the floodgates and S&S was everywhere, in books, comics, and eventually the movies.

It was a wonderful time to be a fan. And now that pendulum has swung away from S&S and heroic fantasy toward the Tolkienesque type of epic fantasy along with the whole new subgenre of urban fantasy.

I hope it eventually swings back. But until it does, I guess I'll have to be content with picking up out-of-print books at the used bookstores.

Unless someone can name some current authors of the genre. (I'm nothing if not persistent. )

flannelberry said:

The megalomaniac who just wants everything *and* is poorly developed.

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He just wants to be well-developed! That's what drove him to evil...

Developing

flannelberry said:

I agree totally that well developed is essential - and has been lacking. I think that was a huge part of what took me away from fantasy in general. The megalomaniac who just wants everything *and* is poorly developed.

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I agree..."sympathetic" is a bit of a red herring. The Bad guy needs to have some set of priorities otherwise the reader correctly perceives him as just an arbitrary plot element and a dull and over-done one at that.

In doing a search I found this website for sword and sorcery book reviews. Some of the reviews are for more recent books under the heading The Young Blades.

Well, I completely disagree that there is poor writing or world building in Conan. There was a ton of both. Anyone who says otherwise has never read Robert E. Howard.

If you go to the website I posted above, go to the articles page, and read "Defining Sword and Sorcery" I came away with the thought that Sword and Sorcery, Heroic Fantasy, and Epic Fantasy are all intertwined and related to be almost indistinguishable and it comes down to whatever term you prefer to use.

I would suggest browsing the fantasy book shelves. Sword and Sandal/Sorcery is alive and well and one of the last bastions of the purely evil villain. Although I, personally, still want the bad guy to have some kind of plausible motivation rather than 'I love to kill, main, destroy bwah ha ha ha'.