Describe your wip's villain?

mentacle

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I'm trying to work on my adult villain in my current WIP and I think I've fallen in love with him a little. But I'm not satisfied. He feels kinda flat and undone. I need examples of great villains, or what goes through other writers' heads when they create one. Villainy is not my strong point, I always prefer to work on my heroes.

Anyway, he's a rumpled old professor type, like Giles from Buffy, but evil, despite genuinely caring for the mc. I'm sure that hits several stereotypes and is kinda boring by now, the evil parental figure (like in Tangled).

Who or what are your current villains? What makes them interesting? And have you come to love them, despite the stuff they do?

I guess I'm distinguishing villains from mere antagonists, too. Villains are the deliciously dastardly people who know they're bad, or willing to go against their own morals, to accomplish something. Does that definition suit?
 

SVenus

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Evil parental figures can make for great villains, especially in YA.
As for your definition, it really depends. There's loads of ways you can systematize villains.
One way I like to look at all characters in general is to compare the morality of their actions with their goals. There are 4 possible outcomes, and the interesting thing is 3 of them are villain or villainous characters.

To elaborate:

1. Good actions + good goals = hero
2. Good actions + bad goals = rare type of villain
3. Bad actions + good goals = misguided/tragic villain
4. Bad actions + bad goals = standard villain

For example, Type 1. would be the hero who saves an orphanage (good action) for the sake of saving the children (good goal)
Type 2. is very rarely seen as far as I can tell, and I'd love to see more of them. Someone who saves an orphanage (good action), but does it so as to later sell the children into slavery (bad goal)
Type 3. is your misguided, sympathetic villain, someone who'll burn down the orphanage (bad action), but does it because maybe the children carry some deadly disease (arguably the good goal, at least from the villain's point of view)
Type 4. is your standard villain stuff, does bad for the sake of bad. Will burn down the orphanage (bad action), to draw out the hero from hiding so as to kill him (bad goal). These can be really fun and hateable, but I think most writers today shy away from them because of the simplicity.

Type 3. are probably the most popular at the moment, and are sometimes villain protagonists. But I think Type 2. have the potential to be the most devious and dangerous of villains. If anyone has any example of them, please share. There are probably some but I really cannot think of any at the moment, because usually even when they do the good action they do it cynically or carelessly. An example I can think of is some businessman villain who donates loads of money to charity, but does it to throw off the scent that he's actually really evil, or something.

When you decide which type you'll go with (or you can combine them, villains are characters too and they can change, go from type 3. to 4. or vice versa), remember all characters need to want something, and all villains are the protagonists of their own story. If you want to write a really sinister, hateable villain, the one kind I always love to hate is the villain who does horrible things but is convinced they're in the right (so, basically type 3.) Someone who'll cut off your arm and tell you it's for your own good.
 

starrystorm

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I just finished the first draft of a YA story that had evil parents. I learned in this process that people don't think this is cliche or aggravating. (I'll link the post when I can find it.)

In my story the parents loved their daughter who ran away because she saw how evil they were. The parents welcomed her back and still loved her. That was my twist. I think as long as you have a twist on it, it should be fine if you still find it cliche.


https://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?343463-The-antagonist-s-the-parent-trope-What-makes-it-cliche
 

MaryLennox

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remember all characters need to want something, and all villains are the protagonists of their own story.

^^^ I always thought this was important - especially villains who think what they're doing is the right thing to do, like the example given of burning the orphange because the children were diseased (and maybe they were going to have very slow, painful deaths while spreading the disease to others?).

What genre are you writing? Personally, I'm really tired of YA fantasy were the villain is a super bad ass god-like most evil of all things evil sort of villain who is hell bent on destroying the entire world. I'd take evil parents over that any day.
 

SVenus

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^^^ I always thought this was important - especially villains who think what they're doing is the right thing to do, like the example given of burning the orphange because the children were diseased (and maybe they were going to have very slow, painful deaths while spreading the disease to others?).

What genre are you writing? Personally, I'm really tired of YA fantasy were the villain is a super bad ass god-like most evil of all things evil sort of villain who is hell bent on destroying the entire world. I'd take evil parents over that any day.

My current project is YA fantasy.
Incidentally, the villain is this sinister Goddess, but in no way super bad ass :D She's more like type 2 + type 3.
I'm not sure world-destroying villains can work very well in YA. Typically you want your villain to oppose your MC's ethics, not just goals. Since YA is basically about coming-of-age (with the usual themes of growing, discovering your place in the world, first love, etc.), the villains are logically authority figures who challenge the MC's coming-of-age (parents, employers, teachers, the government, kings, priests, mayors, gods, etc.), which is why so much of YA is about destroying the oppresive establishment. Why would the establishment want to destroy the world which they themselves control? Not to say it's impossible to make it work. You can, but yeah, I'll take evil parents, too.
 

Layla Nahar

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I still don't know yet. At all. I've got about 50 pages, and I've seen some of the effects the person or persons is having, but as to as to who it is, and why in terms of details - absolutely no idea yet.
 

Paul Lamb

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Most of my characters' antagonists are themselves. They doubt themselves, they misunderstand themselves, they misguide themselves, and the struggle is with them finding their way out of the mess they've made for themselves.
 

SVenus

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Most of my characters' antagonists are themselves. They doubt themselves, they misunderstand themselves, they misguide themselves, and the struggle is with them finding their way out of the mess they've made for themselves.

That's great, and is key to characters with depth, but beside internal conflict there's always room for external conflict, too.
 

Dan Rhys

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I like a villain that one can relate to...meaning that you can understand why he does what he does and slightly sympathize with him and his motives. I don't like the less realistic out-to-conquer-the-world, crazed cartoonish types.

In my case, the villain is a gruff, worn-out detective near retiring, and he wants to solve a big case and get tremendous glory for it regardless of the misery he is bringing to other people's lives.
 

Animad345

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Most of my characters' antagonists are themselves. They doubt themselves, they misunderstand themselves, they misguide themselves, and the struggle is with them finding their way out of the mess they've made for themselves.

I'm the exact same. In my current manuscript, the abstract antagonist is bipolar disorder, which the main character is diagnosed with at seventeen. I absolutely love reading about villainous characters in fiction, but they don't quite fit in any of my stories.
 

K.A Adams

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My WIP has two, the "big baddie" and the current novels antagonist. The big baddie is my MC's father, the vampire King Kyros who earned the title the Blood Lord from him kidnapping humans for slaves and food and treating his only daughter as a weapon to overthrow the worlds form of government. When I first started writing the novel that was it, he was evil cause he lost the love of his life to a human, she loved someone else not him. Obviously that's just boring for a lack of words, so I had to sit down and come up with a more realistic reason as to how him got from point A to point B. Was he always so cruel and human hating? No, evil isn't born it's created or at least to me. So instead of where I started with him I changed his backstory, when he was young he was a very lax young man who would rather be out socializing or reading then deal with his duties that his father pushed on him. He wasn't interested in ruling, he is a vampire so his father would be on the throne for quite some time before he needed to worry about it. But it changed when he meat Leina and fell in love with her but she didn't seem interested in him so he retreated to books to try and find a solution. He stumbled into a soul of an queen of an ancient race that no longer, unknown to him and whispered into his ear. He ended up making a deal with her, if she gets him Leina then she provides him with a body so she can come back. The interactions with her drove him insane and pretty much rotted his mind to the point where he was driven to do disgusting things, force Leina into marriage, bare his child and abuse their child by forcing her to learn to fight so that one day she would be strong enough to overthrow the Magic Council. Kyros is still rather lax when things go his way but once he is pushed he does have a temper and will lash out, as well as calculating. The main focus antagonist wise would be Cerin who is much like my MC hot headed and short tempered because once Kyros found him and raised him sort of like a son he saw Kyros like a father but always lived in my MC's shadow. I would delve more into his backstory and all of that but I feel that I've made this post long enough and I hope it helps.