Make a Purely Evil Villain Interesting

How do you write a completely evil villain without them coming across as shallow, cartoonish imitation of a villain that can only wish to be compellingly vicious villains? Find out here.

Steps

Sample Character Description

Doc:Villain Brainstorm,Villain Backstory,Excerpt About Villain

Making an Interesting Evil Villain

  1. Consider what it means to be good. Anything else is wasting your time, because this is the only thing you actually need to know, you can not create a bad person without knowing what is good then bad is the opposite.
  2. Look at evil acts that people have actually done. Turn to the news and history books to see examples of how real people can do terrible things.
  3. Is your villain human or non-human? If your villain is a non-human creature, things can a bit different. Maybe your non-human creature actually has no concept of good and evil and though may be evil in some way, is more amoral than actually malevolent.
  4. Make them evil because of their choices or actions, not their identity. Evil isn't simply something that someone is, it's something that a person chooses. Give your reader a sense of why this character is evil and not good.
    • Have the villain personally do evil acts (not just order them to happen). To make it more effective, have the evil acts happen to a person that the reader cares about.[1]
  5. Skip lazy shortcuts. To write an interesting character, you'll want to avoid the overused tropes and shortcuts. This includes writing villains who have very little motive.[1]
    • Sadism isn't a real motivation. Your character needs a good reason to do evil acts instead of eating dessert in front of their TV.[2] It's boring, and not very believable, to have a villain who does evil acts "because it's fun."
    • Don't superficially rip off Nazis. Use literal Nazis as villains, or if you use Nazis as an inspiration, do some detailed research about their rationales and how they worked.[1] A person or group shouldn't just seem "bad" because they look like Nazis, but because they are nuanced in their evil beliefs and actions.
    • Mental illness and disabilities don't make people evil. "They're evil because they have a mental condition" is lazy writing that is deeply insulting to the many good people with real emotional and developmental disabilities. (Disabled people aren't more violent than anyone else, but they are much more likely to be victims of violence.[3][4] Don't support discrimination by caricaturing them as evil.)
    • Avoid cheesy, academic language. This is pretty overdone.[1]
  6. Consider how your villain justifies their actions. Avoid the lazy writing of simply having a villain cackle at actions they think are depraved. Even if your villain knows what he is doing is morally indefensible, there still should exist some form of justification in their mind. It may make sense for them alone based on his experiences and beliefs he has formed from them. Here are some justifications a villain might have:[5][2]
    • "I will do anything to earn the acceptance of _____/become a true _____."
    • "The world is full of moral failings, and I am one of the few that is truly virtuous. I must correct others' immorality. If bad things happen to people, it is because they deserve it."
    • "People of group X are monsters/in need of controlling/a waste of space."
    • "Only the strong survive. Losing is a sign of weakness. The weak deserve to lose."
    • "People who X deserve to be put back in their place."
    • "I will stop at nothing to achieve my goal, because it is the greatest good. If other people get in my way, I will stop them. If I happen to hurt others, it doesn't matter, because it is for the greater good."
    • "Members of Minority X are scary and bad. I will do anything to protect my home/town/country from them."
  7. Give the villain understandable and/or compelling motivations and goals. Evil for the pleasure of evil itself is harder to write well. It's chilling to make their evil look like something a human being would do given the right circumstances and mindset (and/or in case of the most of us, enough push).
  8. Examine the villain's interactions with allies or minions. How does he behave towards them? How differently? Is he patient towards his second-in-command, but can impulsively, without a second thought, kill an underling, who has failed a mission? Does he treat his trusted lieutenant as almost his equal, but sneer at his generals when the latter try to question him? Does he perceive his elite warriors as the ideal kind of soldiers superior to everything but himself, but view his lesser footmen as mere cannon fodder? Why? What do his interactions tell about his character?
  9. Consider the parts of the villain that aren't evil. No well written character is either all evil or all good, so your villain should have some neutral or good traits as well.[6]
    • Who does your villain care about? Which people or animals are special to them?
    • Consider what the villain won't do. For example, maybe he is willing to kill people, but considers torture and rape to be unnecessarily cruel. Or she will steal, threaten, and cheat, but she won't kill unless absolutely necessary.
    • Give your villain hobbies. What non-evil things do they do in their spare time? Do they play chess, practice shooting, knit sweaters for Fluffy, write their autobiography?
  10. Give minions, followers and even the lieutenants reasons to follow the villain. Is it fear? Do they have same goals? Do they need the villain’s help to advance their own goals? Are they after the same thing as the villain, but plan on turning against him at the crucial moment? Do they secretly plan vengeance against the villain while maintaining a false identity and pretending to be their ally? Do they follow the villain out of respect, admiration and/or worship and why? Do they secretly want something that the villain possesses or has access to? This helps to give both the villain and lesser bad guys more depth than just flat cardboard cut-outs.
  11. Examine the villain's feelings and interactions with the heroes. Do they find the main hero irritating, because the latter never gives up? Or amusing, because she’s much more persistent and less easy to kill than anyone who’s resisted them in the past?
  12. Consider how you are going to introduce him into the story.
    • One good way of creating suspense is having other characters talk about your villain, show some of his deeds and give the audience sense of him. Later he may come out of the dark with a frightening entrance.

Tips

  • Give them interesting, if not meaningful, things to say.
  • Make them competent, intelligent, and challenging. When they challenge a hero and force them to use their wits, they make both themselves and a hero look more credible. In other words: No stupid villains!
  • Give them a quality that could be sympathetic. Then twist it around and see what happens. Explore various possibilities and see what new you may craft of them.
  • Give them some quirk that fits their personality seamlessly and consistently. It can be a simple oddity in speech patterns, a weird habit, tendency to use a specific kind of word in specific situations or whatever you can come up with. Good example of this is Kefka from Final Fantasy 6 with his habit of saying the word 'hate' quickly about 20 times in a row whenever he’s expressing hate.
  • Be aware of the class and style of your villain. Beware the clichés, because sometimes they may make your bad guy unintentionally cheesy. Use your own twists and try to be as subtle as possible (unless, again, you’re going for the simple feel).
  • Sometimes a traumatic past may work, sometimes it may not.
  • Don’t always make a villain ugly, especially if his hideousness is just a tell-tale sign of his evil. Often, a roguishly handsome or just normal-looking fellow committing evil deeds is more frightening because of contradiction between outer and inner being.
    • If you do make an ugly villain, come up with a good reason for it. Was he disfigured because of an accident? Is he of monstrous, predatory species, whose biology differs from humans? Is he a member of an ethnic group, where a scarred face is a sign of loyalty to a deity? Was he wounded in a fight? Use your imagination.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 http://springhole.net/writing/write_better_villains.htm
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 http://misslunarose.deviantart.com/art/Paper-Villains-306875874
  3. ↑ http://psychcentral.com/archives/violence.htm
  4. ↑ http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/fixing-the-system/features-and-news/2030-new-study-mentally-ill-are-often-targets-of-violence
  5. ↑ http://springhole.net/writing/mindsets-and-rationales-that-lend-to-villainy.htm
  6. ↑ http://springhole.net/writing/more-villain-tips.htm
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