Mighty curious, how does a writer top their own villain story-to-story, whether it be any genre or any series of stories? I hope anyone reading this can make sense of this. Say you got a real mean guy, he gets killed in the end of your story. But you are trying to top that villain in the next story and so on and so on.
Again, how does a writer top their own villains making them meaner and meaner the following books just to keep the readers interested.
Why try to top a villain? If you do this, you would need to keep topping your protagonist. Pretty soon you;d have superman versus Lex Luther.
The villain should fit the story. Each villain can be different, but there's no need at all to make each one bigger, or meaner, or more evil than the last.
It isn't even necessary to have a villain. Hero and villain is just one kind of story, and generally overdone. Protagonist and antagonist is better, at least for me.
The protagonist is on one side of an issue, and the antagonist is on the other. This doesn't mean either one is a hero, or either one is an evil villain. It just means they're on opposing sides.
How about a western range war between settlers and big ranchers. Movies usually portray the ranchers as evil, the settlers as good. This was not always the case. The ranchers came out early, fought and worked hard, faced many dangers, to build their ranches. Now settlers pour west in a much safer environment, and they want the same land the rancher worked for years to make safe for his cattle.
How do you blame the rancher for wanting to keep land that he made safe, that he worked and fought for long before settlers dared risk coming west?
And how do you blame poor settlers for wanting a better life for their families? Especially when the government says the rancher has no right to all that land, even if he is the one who made it safe.
Sometimes there are no good guys or bad guys, there are just people who want opposing things, and both sides are willing to fight for what they want.
Even when there are bad guys, few of them were truly evil, were truly villainous. Some were, of course. Some few were as evil as you can get. But most were just people trying to get by the best way they could, and who believed in what they were doing.
Anyway, I think the idea of topping your villain each time is a bad idea. Change the story, change the villain, change whatever it is everyone wants, but don't try to keep making each villain worse than the last.
