When an Entire Species Goes Bad...

It depends on what the author is trying to get across.

I don't think ambiguous sides would have worked well in LotR. It wasn't that kind of story. You don't have two sides who can be legitimately seen as both good or evil. You just have one side, good, and the other, evil. Easy peasy, rice-and-cheesy.

Personally I prefer a little bit of ambiguity in my reading. But that may just be me.

I'm very into ambiguous stuff at the moment, especially in terms of MC. I've been reading a lot of stories recently with morally ambiguous MCs, and I love writing them. In terms of villain, or villainous race, I think for me as a reader it's more interesting if there is something that makes them not entirely evil, making it (in theory) harder for the heroes to do away with them. I also like, if you have a race, particularly if it's not big hairy beasties or whatever but a race similar to the hero's, if not every single one is evil, but you have a range of personality there too. So you might get help from one of them even though you're at war etc. I'd've liked to have seen more of that in the Harry Potter books with the Slytherins, especially in the last book, though I shan't go into details for spoiler reasons. Anyone who's read it will probably know the bit I mean. That's just as an example.

In LOTR, I agree with Dempsey that the point was an overwhelming evil that had to be defeated, and the manner of the Orcs' creation perhaps didn't leave much room for ambiguity (if they had been corrupted), but even so there were a few little moments. Wormtongue, for one, had a vague hint here and there that he might have been redeemable, or that's how I picked it up. To me, if there is a chance the bad guy might have been okay had things worked out differently, it makes the story more powerful.

I don't read a lot of SF but I have noticed a lot of this idea in SF movies / TV though, more so than fantasy - where you have a race of completley alien creatures, they tend to be more universally evil, I think.

I too like ambiguity. People, after all, come in all sorts of varieties. Even when you need a race to wear black hats, you can do it in an interesting way.

What if your race just follows an evil philosophy? If the evilness of the race is based on a set of beliefs than you have a lot of advantages. You can still easily make it about good guys and bad guys, but you can give it depth by exploring the beliefs themselves. Why do they feel that their twisted code is right? It could be very Nietzsche, in that they may abhor weakness. Maybe it's based on an interesting view of religion. Maybe some event happened that brought them to this state of mind. Imagine if the race had been almost obliterated by another one and they developed this harsh mindset to keep them alive. They would still be bad guys, but now there is a little ring of tragedy to their evil.

You can also bring in a character who doesn't ascribe to the same philosophy as his peers. Here's this guy who believes in the hero's moral code, and yet, he is considered a traitor by his own race. Does he feel like a betrayer? Does he force the hero to re examine his attitude about the race?

I subscribe to the idea that most (possibly ALL) stories are essentially about the struggle between good and evil. Now I realize the three basic conflicts are always going to be:

Man vs. Man

Man. vs. Nature

Man vs. Self


But it's STILL a conflict, a struggle, an antag and a protag (even with the third one). So when you do a hostile species, you have a variation on/hybrid of the first and second types of struggles. So you HAVE to pick out threads of good and evil SOMEWHERE in the mix. The reader wants to respond to those threads. The reader wants to/needs to IDNETIFY with the protag, and therefore the reader wants to/needs to label him as "good" (the guy with the white hat) and the antag as "bad" (the guy with the black hat). This isn't an option --it's a prerequisite. It's a given. It's an inevitability.

Now you as the writer can certainly tangle things around and blur the lines between black and white, making this and that concerning both sides of the conflict turn out to be far more grey that traditional fiction would have. That's always allowable.

Meanwhile, the current TV series "Battlestar: Galactica" has bad guy killer robots who are actually very sympathetic when compared to the evil sadistic humans we of the audience are supposed to be rooting for. This ongoing dichotomy in that TV series is by design. The show is meant to make us stop and think about our own humanity, about what makes us "human" and to ponder whether we truly are so deserving and so justified in our struggle against those who we ("we" Americans) deem to be the bad guys. It won a Peabody Award because of this deeply intellectual, compelling, and bitingly relevent exploration of good vs. evil.


I think the recent remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" made a compelling statement. Wouldn't it have been better for everyone if Nicole Kidman had just let the alien spore/virus take over our planet? Supposedly there was no true robbing of identity and of individuality when one became assimlated into the invasion force. The only drawback was the need to eliminate any of the truly rare humans who were immune to the invasion virus (such as her son). Yes--that would have been a difficult price for her to pay, but humanity as a whole would have been better off, right? And THAT was why the closing scene of the film was of her standing in her kitchen staring silently at Daniel Craig as he complained about the lastest news in world politics: death and destruction, war and boodshed. All of that sorrow from the newspaper would have been done away with forever had she not stopped the invasion. But can you blame her? It was her son! Her instincts were to SAVE her child, the rest of the world be damned! Well, she got exactly that now didn't she? Yes she did. Hooray for her!

AllisterGrim said:

I too like ambiguity. People, after all, come in all sorts of varieties. Even when you need a race to wear black hats, you can do it in an interesting way.

What if your race just follows an evil philosophy? If the evilness of the race is based on a set of beliefs than you have a lot of advantages. You can still easily make it about good guys and bad guys, but you can give it depth by exploring the beliefs themselves. Why do they feel that their twisted code is right? It could be very Nietzsche, in that they may abhor weakness. Maybe it's based on an interesting view of religion. Maybe some event happened that brought them to this state of mind. Imagine if the race had been almost obliterated by another one and they developed this harsh mindset to keep them alive. They would still be bad guys, but now there is a little ring of tragedy to their evil.

You can also bring in a character who doesn't ascribe to the same philosophy as his peers. Here's this guy who believes in the hero's moral code, and yet, he is considered a traitor by his own race. Does he feel like a betrayer? Does he force the hero to re examine his attitude about the race?

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I think that's part of what has always made the X-Men so compeling. Magneto is NOT such a bad guy when you exmaine his motives and his intentions.

Most of Marvel's works starting in the 1960's were very pioneering in their effort to blur the line between good and evil: making good guys who had selfish motives, and bad guys who had sympathetic motives.

I don't like it when a whole species is presented as evil. There has to be at least one good member of the species.

I like to think that, aside from Star Wars' clone army, most individuals have some say as to their character so no one entity can be completely bad in all its incarnations.

Well, do we consider the ethics of the virus?
The piranha?
The goat-killing tiger?
The man-eating tiger?
The Nazi who works at the deathcamp, but didn't want to be there, but does his job anyway ???

I think it's in the eye of the beholder, and the writer has to ask: How much do I want the reader to see?

But an interesting quirk (?) of human psychology is: Everybody loves "an underdog" sometimes.

I'm the last polar bear, buddy. My world was beautiful and natural and your dirty little human civilization choked it to death so the idiot neighbors could all have extra materialist crap to clutter their stoopid lives with, to numb their empty existences with. Their big screen teevee wasn't big enough, so they choked the world to death.

And you stepped into that subway car, and yes, I was devouring a skidrow drunken derelict. But there are many derelicts, and they made their life's choices ... and I am the last polar bear and I never had a choice. Or I am a mother polar bear, and my babies are starving.

And all i want, is for you to let me walk out that subway car door, and don't call the police so they can hunt me down for doing the only things they left for me to do, let me disappear into a cold dark tunnel, buddy, and be free. Cause we all just wanted to be free. And you still have a choice, and I never did.

Do the right thing, buddy. Let me live.

Empathy is the writer's soul-stirring weapon.

Empathy.

Can an alien species be entirely evil? Not convincingly. Can it be inscrutable enough in its motives to appear entirely evil? Yes, certainly.

wuzupbling22 said:

I don't like it when a whole species is presented as evil. There has to be at least one good member of the species.

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Explain that to my cats.

caw

AnneMarble said:

is always presented as evil? For example, Tolkien's Orcs

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this is a huge error regarding LotR - at the end of RotK Aragorn pardons the orcs and gives them the lands around the sea of Nurnen and they realise they have been lied to. The genesis of the orcs is important - they are ruined Elves, remember, and the uruk-hai orc/man half-breeds. So aside formthe the end of RotK they aren't even a distinct species.

The work is also full of ambiguous relations with good and, good Numenoreans, bad ones, good elves and bad ones evil, bad men of middle earth and good and so on. And then there is Sam (Faramir in the film) wondering if the dead Southron was truly evil or forced to fight against his will.

Tolkien, as much as anyone, realised that good and evil are not absolutes, and neither are peoples. His work is often done a grave disrespect in this regard.

And I would agree, ambiguity is important in the casting of characteristics and behaviours. Going back to LotR - we see the orcs at that time, and then there is a change.

In the same way that if all we saw were WW2 flicks with Stormtroopers killing as they charged across France we will get a distorted view of what Germans were and are.

Perle_Rare said:

I like to think that, aside from Star Wars' clone army, most individuals have some say as to their character so no one entity can be completely bad in all its incarnations.

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I find it interesting that the clones, who are human stock, are so regimented and absolute, while the droids, mechanical/electronic/programmed beings, are so sympathetic and human-seeming.

small axe said:

Well, do we consider the ethics of the virus?
The piranha?
The goat-killing tiger?
The man-eating tiger?
The Nazi who works at the deathcamp, but didn't want to be there, but does his job anyway ???

I think it's in the eye of the beholder, and the writer has to ask: How much do I want the reader to see?

But an interesting quirk (?) of human psychology is: Everybody loves "an underdog" sometimes.

I'm the last polar bear, buddy. My world was beautiful and natural and your dirty little human civilization choked it to death so the idiot neighbors could all have extra materialist crap to clutter their stoopid lives with, to numb their empty existences with. Their big screen teevee wasn't big enough, so they choked the world to death.

And you stepped into that subway car, and yes, I was devouring a skidrow drunken derelict. But there are many derelicts, and they made their life's choices ... and I am the last polar bear and I never had a choice. Or I am a mother polar bear, and my babies are starving.

And all i want, is for you to let me walk out that subway car door, and don't call the police so they can hunt me down for doing the only things they left for me to do, let me disappear into a cold dark tunnel, buddy, and be free. Cause we all just wanted to be free. And you still have a choice, and I never did.

Do the right thing, buddy. Let me live.

Empathy is the writer's soul-stirring weapon.

Empathy.

Click to expand...

I need a bear rug in front of my fireplace. Bear should have evolved.

Albedo said:

Can an alien species be entirely evil? Not convincingly. Can it be inscrutable enough in its motives to appear entirely evil? Yes, certainly.

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Well, for an alien species to become star-faring (or do whatever) it must understand cooperation, which is a virtue (unless they are slaves and blindly obedient) so they can't be all bad. But there is no guarantee they would put any value on another sentient species. Every race is going to put its own survival above all other considerations. If they see us as a long term threat, look out.

oscuridad said:

this is a huge error regarding LotR - at the end of RotK Aragorn pardons the orcs and gives them the lands around the sea of Nurnen and they realise they have been lied to. The genesis of the orcs is important - they are ruined Elves, remember, and the uruk-hai orc/man half-breeds. So aside formthe the end of RotK they aren't even a distinct species.

The work is also full of ambiguous relations with good and, good Numenoreans, bad ones, good elves and bad ones evil, bad men of middle earth and good and so on. And then there is Sam (Faramir in the film) wondering if the dead Southron was truly evil or forced to fight against his will.

Tolkien, as much as anyone, realised that good and evil are not absolutes, and neither are peoples. His work is often done a grave disrespect in this regard.

And I would agree, ambiguity is important in the casting of characteristics and behaviours. Going back to LotR - we see the orcs at that time, and then there is a change.

In the same way that if all we saw were WW2 flicks with Stormtroopers killing as they charged across France we will get a distorted view of what Germans were and are.

Click to expand...

Much of Tolkien's work is about the corruption of power. Don't forget, in the end Frodo chose to keep the ring for his own.

BTW, how is it the orcs survived for so many centuries? Did they breed? We never see any orc children. I can't believe they were all created, there just weren't enough elves and men around to corrupt, to supply all the orcs.

I'm reading the Silmarillion, for the umpteenth time, and the orcs seem to be corrupted tortured elves. Melkor, one of the Valar, similar to the fallen Lucifer, turned Sauron, the balrog, elves, and certain animals to his evil ends. Making the rings brought over even more to the dark side. Saruman made tens of thousands of urukhai hatching them from the corrupted earth.

I really don't like when books have an entire race/species as inherintly "bad". To me it has disturbingly racist overtones, the kind of generalising an entire race under a negative title.

Main example of this would be David Eddings, especially Belgariad/Mallorean. The fact that he has all the Eastern races as evil just reeks of Xenophobia to me.

I know it can be easier to have a set group all behave the same in fiction, but it just doesn't sit well with me.

Ask around the animal world and they might tell you that the human race is inherently evil. Wipe out other lifeforms and when they treat them well it's always for selfish reasons, if not to just kill them and eat them more easily.

Wolverines are all evil. So are jellyfish. And how about those killer bees? Even within the subset of dogs, you have good races like Labradors and Boxers and mean, rotten races like Chows or those little yappy furball types.

Within humanity, it's harder to draw racial lines like that, but there are certainly countries that qualify as rotten and evil. (I won't get into whether or not the contemporary US is one of them, but I'd hate to see a worldwide poll on the issue)

So you run into a space navy run by mean, brutal, conniving assholes that all look alike: maybe it's an entire race, or maybe you just lucked into hitting the military wing of the equivalent of N. Korea or Uganda or Syria or the Detroit Pistons.

I'm not bored by good vs. evil. But in someways it seems too easy. Personally I am more fascinated by the complexities of social relativism.

Plot Device said:

I think that's part of what has always made the X-Men so compeling. Magneto is NOT such a bad guy when you exmaine his motives and his intentions.

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A funny side note is the fact that Magneto actually didn't have a motivation for the first few issues. Really, he just showed up and attacked a random air force base for no readily explained cause, then left.

I like him more with the reasons too.

All right, time for me to bring forth my age old adage that I wholeheartedly stole from JMS: The Monsters never see's a Monster in the mirror.

You can have a race of evil beings if they don't believe they're evil. Good example: The Shadows, from Babylon 5. They come out once every 1000 years and smash up the galaxy, starting wars and exterminating entire races. Why? Well, they belive that the cause of evolution can only be pushed forward by conflict, by war. Weak races die, strong races thrive and the galaxy becomes a better place for the next 1000 years.

Another example would be the big bad guy in the video game The Witcher: He doesn't see anything wrong with creating a race of supermutants and enslaving humanity. Why? Because he and others have had prophetic dreams foretelling the coming of the White Frost, an ice age. The only way humanity can hope to survive is to flee South. But look at the rulers of the world, the kings, the priests and the mages. The kings keep fighting each other, the priests just want power and...who knows what the mages want. if taking away free will will save people's lives...why not do it?

Now, both examples are monstrous. The Shadows kill billions of innocent people, and the bad guy from the Witcher who has a long, hard to remember name, experiments on children, murders families wholesale, stars vicious race riots between humans and non-humans, and tried to murder the main character and everyone he cares about.


What's the moral of the story? Well, for one, immediately rush out and buy the Witcher and the five seasons of Babylon 5. And secondly, you can have a race be as evil as you want as long as they have a good, understandable reason that they believe.

You don't have to believe it, but the characters do.

I hope that helps.

HeronW said:

I'm reading the Silmarillion, for the umpteenth time, and the orcs seem to be corrupted tortured elves. Melkor, one of the Valar, similar to the fallen Lucifer, turned Sauron, the balrog, elves, and certain animals to his evil ends. Making the rings brought over even more to the dark side. Saruman made tens of thousands of urukhai hatching them from the corrupted earth.

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the hatching out of the earth thing was entirely a Peter Jackson invention, I believe. In the book Aragorn wonders if Saruman has 'blended the races of Orcs and Men...'
In the Silmarillion it is absolutely clear that the orcs are captured and corrupted elves and that they breed. It as was said earlier, the overriding theme is the corruption of absolute power - that is why the characters of Sam, Galadriel, Aragorn and Gandalf are so important - they are all tempted at various points in the narrative, but all refuse the temptation. Contrast them with Gollum, Boromir, Saruman and Denethor. Interesting stuff. Whoever said social relativism was more interesting was bang on the money, though.

I'm bothered when an alien race is presented as inherently evil.

However, I think it's reasonable for an alien race to be presented as having values and goals that seem evil from a human perspective.

I much prefer it when if there has to be a race that is evil, that they are not all evil and it's not some huge xenophobic subtext. That's annoying. Some of that "evil" race would undoutedly see the overall actions of their kind monstrous and in a very real way, refuse to fully identify with them.

However I do prefer if when an evil character fully realises they are evil. The emotions and thought-paths there seem fascinating. Do they despise themselves for it? Do they relish it?