IS YOUR VILLAIN TOO EVIL? How to write a compelling villain worthy of your novel.

ART by RBT. Check out the artist's website and instagram.

Everyone loves a good villain.
Without a worthy villain to oppose them, a protagonist would probably never even leave the couch.

So today I want to ask the question:

​What is it exactly that makes a good villain?

​Mary Shelley, author of 'Frankenstein' has been quoted as saying:

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for the happiness, the good he seeks.

​And I guess the exact opposite of this statement is to create a villain who is evil only for the sake of being evil, or is only evil for the sake of a story plot.

And if someone is simply evil only to give your hero someone to fight, then they run the risk of becoming simply a caricature of a bad person, instead of a living breathing villain.
 
In short. They don’t feel real.

I have noticed that so many new fiction writers fall into this pitfall, myself included.
Maybe it is a rite of passage? I dunno.

For example, my very first book (which I have long since deemed completely unusable ) starred a TRULY AWFUL VILLAIN. I mean this guy was sweaty. He had bad breath. He was ugly and gruff and really mean. He was even racist!
So clearly this guy was BAD NEWS​.

Except of course he wasn’t.

He was just a seriously weak character that had a role to play within my plot, but no presence whatsoever within my story.
No one sighed with relief when he was vanquished, because he simply wasn’t scary.
 
So why is this?
 
He was just too evil without ever having a legitimate reason to be that way. Which means he was two dimensional. He wasn’t real.
After all, villains are people too.
​
 
Examples of stupid villains?

The leader of the Hilltop community in 'The Walking Dead' TV show, first seen in season 6.
His name is Gregory.  

In case you are not familiar, in The Walking Dead they introduced Gregory, the leader of this Hilltop community, in a way that made it pretty damn obvious we were meant to hate the character.

They made him too cowardly, too sexist, and to top it all off, they wrote that his character couldn't even remember the names or faces of the people he leads, even after two years living with them in a tiny enclosed safe zone. Even after surviving the zombie apocalypse with these people and effectively becoming some of the last survivors of the entire human race.

​So..... the show basically tried to clumsily manipulate us into thinking this leader was an EVIL PERSON because he hadn’t bothered to learn the names of the people who worked for him.
Which I thought was just stupid.

Not because that isn't an effective sign of bad leadership (because it is) but simply because it was tacked on simply to make us hate him, not because it made any sense to the character's position or environment.
​
It is a perfect example of a  villain being too evil for no reason, simply to make us despise him.

ART by RBT. Check out the artist's website and instagram.

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And I think it is just lazy writing.
(P.S, the first five season of this show are total TV gold).​

Good villains?

​Darth Vader.
(You knew I was heading this way, right? Because of the picture at the start, right?)
 
This man is both good and bad.
He is absolutely terrifying, yet at heart he is someone who tried his best but lost his way.

He murders without remorse.
He helms a space station that destroyed his own daughter’s home planet, her entire family wiped out before her eyes.

​He massacred younglings and hunted Jedi who survived Order 66, assassinating them and doing Palpatine’s bidding for many many years.

​Yet he is also filled with doubt.
And you cannot deny he loves his son.

So Darth Vader is not simply a bad man. He is a complex human of many contradictions, one who has made bad choices and done terrible things.

And I think that is exactly what makes a compelling villain.
​

Humanity.

​

​Let’s look at the Wilson Fisk character, the Kingpin, from the first season of the excellent TV show, 'Daredevil'.

He is a gangster.
He shoots people.
He tortures people.
He smashes a dude’s head into pieces right in front of us.
He builds an empire on dirty money and dirty dealings.

He shows no remorse.
He only wants more.
​
And he is romancing a woman who makes him awkward and shy.

Seeing this formidable villain fumble his way through this new romance shows us something new about who he is.

It shows us that he can be kind. 

Which gives him depth. It makes the viewer actually begin to like him, even though we just watched him smash a man’s head in with a car door. 
Now that is the power of a compelling villain. 
​

​​So my takeaway from this lesson, is probably the word ‘humanity’.
 
​
Unless your villain is a predator from another world, I think the key word should always be humanity.
Make sure your villains have it.

Definitely still make them as evil as you like, by all means go all the way, just make sure they are not bad for the sake of being bad.

After all, villains surely don’t believe themselves to be villains. They probably think they are doing the best they can with the cards the world has dealt them. They are living life the way they believe they should, within the rules of their world.

So if your villain (or a side character who is clearly meant to be BAD NEWS within your plot) is smelly, ugly, sweaty, sexist, racist, mean and violent, and is written that way for no other reason except making your readers hate them,  maybe it's time to think about approaching it a little differently.