What makes a good villain?
Well, that's really debatable. Make a villain too good, and he stops being the villain, and just starts being a sort of Machiavellian hero. Readers/viewers starts to root for the villain. This ultimately makes the story a much more gray area, and weakens the argument of the story (unless your argument is that there's no black or white, only gray).
The other problem is that your villain has to be be somewhat realistic. Snidley Whiplash twirling his mustache isn't believable because he's so one dimensional. He has no purpose other than to join together with Dick Dasterdly and Old Man Withers (who those meddling kids unmasked as The Creeper) and tie as many damsels to train tracks as possible. We don't believe him because even the villain doesn't spend all his time plotting nefarious deeds. He has to have things he likes (that aren't kicking puppies). People who like him (who aren't scarf wearing dogs that laugh at everything). He has to be multifaceted.
These problems are doubly compounded when you're dealing with a villain who isn't the Big Bad of the story.
When you're dealing wish a villain who is under the Big Bad, you have to find some form of justification for him serving the greater evil. You also have to find a valid reason why he doesn't try to usurp the Big Bad. You have to do both of these while making him believable and not just another Nazi soldier from Raiders of the Lost Ark (seriously, did any of them besides Toht have character traits other than "wears a uniform" vs "bald and shirtless"? Belloq doesn't count, he was an opportunistic bastard, not a Nazi).
I bring all of this up because I'm facing this problem in working out the lead villain of Eastgate - Baron Sotiras Archontas.
Archontas is a Wrath Lord. Basically the equivalent of one of the Nazgul in LotR. He's beyond undead, bound to the One True Lord, and placed in charge of what used to be the greatest city of men, to run it and oppress it's citizens as he sees fit.
Okay, sounds pretty solid basis for a villain, right?
Here's my problem: How do you make an evil ghost in human clothes, bound to a "dark god" a believable villain? He clearly doesn't have a little kid he plays catch with. He clearly doesn't have a sick mother he's taking care of. He doesn't have a group of friends he goes drinking with. He appears to "live" just to be evil.
The only real models I can find the look to for this guy are people like Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Stalin. The problem with these people, though, is that they're in notoriously tight lipped places. They're elevated above the people and made to be deified (figuratively, mind you) in the eyes of the people. They are prevented from seeming human to those around them, and have never really given a tremendous amount of press access.
You never see evil dictators giving interviews on The Daily Show. Castro hasn't gone on The Tonight Show since he overthrew Batista, and when he did go on, he wasn't yet the revolutionary we know him as today. You never see people writing books on what a cool guy Hitler was behind the scenes (Possibly rightfully so. I mean, Hitler was undoubtedly evil, but I would love to read a book on Hitler behind the scenes that makes him seem like a guy you'd wanna go for a beer with. I think that it would make him seem that much more terrible, because it'd make him more real).
These men also weren't thousands of years old and largely incorporeal.
When you look at how nearly immortal evil doers are handled in fantasy, you tend to get either the Tolkien treatment (they're in the background and you never meet them) or you get what I'm calling the Sanderson treatment (they're in the story, and there's more going on than being evil, but they're still relatively hidden from view until after they've left the story).
I can't approach Archontas like either of those (the One True Lord is another story entirely). This is because Archontas is the primary villain of this story. He's the one who puts together the plan that Eira and company have to thwart. He's knows that the heroes of the story have what he's looking for and he's not opposed to making direct moves to try to acquire it. He doesn't just sit in his "palace" plotting evil schemes, or sending out henchmen to do his bidding. More importantly, he also steps directly into the story in the third act, bringing him into direct confrontation with the stories heroes.
He needs to seem commanding, as someone who's been in charge for hundreds of years would be, but at the same time he needs to be the type who inspires loyalty. Fear may have brought the orcs in line behind the Witch King, but in reality that sort of thing doesn't work.
I've got a little over a week to at least figure out he basics of this character.
Guess I had to figure him out sometime.
No comments:
Post a Comment