A recent discussion with a group of friends led me to think about what makes the perfect villain.
Villains, evil dudes, big bads, bad guys, baddies. Whatever you call them, they're usually antagonists. I say usually because one of the first pieces advice I ever received about writing them was to have them act as though they're the protagonist in their own story. Villains don't think of themselves as villains. They don't even think of themselves as antagonists. They are living their own lives (metaphorically); the "protagonist" of the main story is probably not the protagonist of the villain's story.
Perfect villains, for me, have a few criteria. Their actions are usually unambiguously 'bad' or immoral (but not within their own moral code). They have to want the opposite of what the protagonist wants. And they have to have reasons-- but not justifications-- for being evil.
#6: Prosper English (Evil Genius series)
How can I describe Prosper English? He's like evil wrapped in anger wrapped in revenge. His hair is insured for AUS $10,000. He does car commercials in Japan.
Prosper English, if you don't know, is the main antagonist of Catherine Jinks' wonderful, lovely, extremely well-written Evil Genius series. Evil Genius and its sequels Genius Squad and Genius Wars follow Cadel Piggott, a young Australian boy who has a knack for computers. Such a knack, in fact, that he's banned from even being in the same room as a computer for fear of what he might do. His adoptive parents Stuart and Lana take him to see a therapist, Thaddeus Roth. Dr. Roth allows Cadel to use the computer in his office. So what does Cadel do? Well, he ties up all the traffic in Sydney by staging a bomb hoax. He just likes studying systems that much. And if he can break it, then he knows he understands it.
There are a few spoilers to English's identity, so I strongly recommend you read the Evil Genius series immediately. (No, I'm not getting paid for this. I wish I was. Just go read it. Bookmark this page and come back. It's okay. I'll wait.) But let's just say he and Thaddeus Roth are more connected than you might think.
Anyway, Prosper and Cadel square off many times throughout the series. Prosper and Cadel are equally smart, but in different ways. Cadel wants to be normal; Prosper wants him to use his intelligence for evil. Prosper and Cadel are a great match as protag and antag because they have an understanding of each other that a lot of foil pairs don't seem to have. And Prosper's motivations for being the bad guy in the first place... (Cough... spoilers.)
#5: Opal Koboi (Artemis Fowl series)
The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer is full of complex characters with varying wants and motivations. Artemis himself starts the series as an unsympathetic millionaire twelve-year-old who wants to kidnap a fairy to gain gold in a ransom deal. Sounds evil enough-- until we learn that Artemis is going to use the money to fund an expedition to locate his missing father. See? Complex characters. Excellent character development. And a big bad whose take-over-the-world plan involves killing a clone of herself to trigger a nuclear reaction that will enhance her magic and allow her to enslave all humans.
Opal Koboi is a super-genius pixie who wants to take over the world. Her rival is Foaly, a technologically-minded centaur who probably just wants to show off his newest invention and eat some carrots. They've had a rivalry for years, ever since a fateful science fair in college.
Opal and Foaly are two sides of the same mad scientist coin. Opal wants to enslave humans and make them inferior to the fairy People; Foaly might be egotistical and rude (like Opal), but he's not outright genocidal.
Opal is also a foil to Artemis Fowl himself. Opal wants to destroy the world and remake it in her image; Artemis becomes a staunch conservationist by the fifth book. Their intellects rival one another: Artemis is a competent inventor and scientist in his own right. This makes the fairy-supremacist Opal quite nervous. You can see how they don't exactly get along. (Plot bunny for established fans of AF: what if Opal and Artemis worked together?)
Opal is ruthless and dedicated, good traits for any villain to have. She's extremely intelligent and able to hold her own against three of the most advanced minds on (or under) Earth. She has one overarching goal in life and she's unwilling to compromise on it. Opal Koboi is scary dangerous.
#4: Draco Malfoy (Harry Potter series)
I know, I know. "You're doing a Harry Potter villain and it's not Voldemort or Snape?!" Yes, I am. Because foils are great. You'll see.
Draco Malfoy is set up to be a slimy villain. Born into an old family, already learning magic before even starting school, sorted into the most prestigious house at Hogwarts. His parents supported the winning side in the last war, even if that side was morally reprehensible. The House of Malfoy has a reputation, and Draco is ready to benefit from it the minute he steps foot onto Hogwarts soil. Yeah, life is good for Draco Malfoy.
And then this kid who knows so little about magic and tradition that he may as well be a muggleborn comes along and fouls it all up. Harry Potter: the Boy Who Lived. He has come ostensibly to steal any glory the house of Malfoy might have been able to recoup with their only son entering Hogwarts. If you're Draco Malfoy, what do you do?
Here we have our inciting incident: the thing that makes Draco want to be a bad guy. He was actually happy to try and make friends with Harry (in a Slytherin kind of way). But when Harry rejected him, Draco decided to become something like the anti-Harry. And he does this by trying to emulate Harry pretty much however he can. Look, teenage boys are weird, okay?
J.K. Rowling sets up lots of nice parallels between Draco and Harry for us throughout the series. They're both unusually good at Quidditch for their age. They both have favorite professors who are also their heads of house. They both have two close friends: Harry has Hermione and Ron, and Draco has Crabbe and Goyle (who are more like body guards than friends. Maybe the anti-Ron and anti-Hermione are Blaise Zabini and Pansy Parkinson instead.) Harry even almost gets sorted into the same house as Draco. (There's even a fan rewrite of the series-- through the sixth book-- where Harry does get put in Slytherin.)
So here we have two boys who are very similar to one another, but who make extremely different choices. The perfect foils.
Draco spends his time at Hogwarts tormenting Harry and co and trying to make Gryffindor house look bad. He uses the Wizarding equivalent of racial slurs towards Hermione. But that's extremely mean-spirited harassment, not villainy. Villains don't have to be racist to be evil. I mean, it helps establish them as jerks, but it's not necessary. What is necessary if to have your villain be aware that they're bad.
And Draco's real shining moment of villainy-- arguably his biggest moment as a character and a plot motivator-- comes when he does something borderline heroic and rejects his parents' Death Eater legacy. Draco, despite his sparkly new Dark Mark tattoo, refuses to kill Albus Dumbledore. Okay, so I openly admit to disliking Dumbledore. He's an abusive manipulator who doesn't know how to properly care for children. His motivations are almost entirely self-centered. Look again at his motivations for finding the Horcruxes. But within the narrative of the story, refusing to kill Dumbledore just sends Draco into a downward spiral of self-doubt and misery.
Draco is a good villain because he rejects villainy and at least attempts to repair the mistakes his parents have made. He's atoning for the sins of his father in much the same way Harry "atones" for Voldemort's sins by, you know, zapping him to death with magic.
Yay for redemption arcs? You betcha.
#3: Professor James Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes)
Show of hands: how many of you like Elementary better than Sherlock? Okay, okay, no fandom wars. Both of them handle their Moriarties pretty well. I have a clear bias (I got to stand this close to one of Lucy Liu's Watson costumes at the Sherlock exhibit at the Columbus Center of Science and Industry!) but I can see how both shows have their merits. And really, I'm just in it for the bad guys.
James Moriarty is a shadowy, mysterious figure that torments the labyrinthine mind of Sherlock Holmes. He matches Holmes at every turn, effortlessly keeping up with his amazing intellect. He's Holmes' arch-nemesis... except he's not. Not really.
Moriarty actually only shows up in a few of the original Holmes stories. You probably know The Reichenbach Fall, which has been done to death. (Pardon the pun.) Moriarty also appears in The Final Problem and The Valley of Fear, but that's pretty much it for him. He has more-or-less cameos in five other Holmes stories. And he never even actually meets Watson, who is the "writer" of the Holmes adventures. That's a far cry from the intellectual rivalry the slash fic writers would have you believe exists between Holmes and Moriarty.
Uh, moving swiftly onwards. What makes Moriarty's impact as a villain so great is how spinoffs of the original canon have handled him (and occasionally... her). Andrew Scott's Moriarty in the BBC version of Sherlock is basically the only thing that redeemed the show for me. (But we can talk about my distaste for Steven Moffat another time.) I haven't personally witnessed Natalie Dormer's Jamie Moriarty in Elementary, but I've heard great things about it. And I mean, come on, it's Natalie Dormer. Even Jared Harris' Moriarty in the Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows managed to intrigue me, for all the train wreck that movie was.
Moriarty is just timeless, which is what earned him the #2 spot on this list. He's like Holmes' evil twin, probably the only person in the world who could keep up with Holmes' fast-paced and brilliant deductions.
#2: Erik Lensherr/Magneto (X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past)
This is the part of the post where I admit to not actually knowing what I'm talking about. Yes, I am one of those Marvel fans who hasn't read the past 50 years of comic canon. Sue me, I just think the new movies are pretty cool and I haven't done all my research yet. Fake geek and proud.
My villain love for Magneto knows no bounds. It is eternal, like the Phoenix Force. It is strong, like Hercules. It constantly regenerates, like Wolverine. It-- okay, I think you've got the picture. Magneto is a truly excellent villain because Professor X is a great hero.
But come on, the last two movies have done a great job with Magneto. Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence getting yet another movie is something I could have done without, but that's not my call. (In my defense, I haven't actually paid to see either of the movies.) And how can you dislike Ian McKellan, who reprises his Magneto in DoFP? That's Gandalf, my friends. No one hates Gandalf.
Movie!Magneto is different from comics!Magneto. He actually knows Mystique here, for one thing. His kind of on-again-off-again thing with her is a little weird, but he and Jennifer Lawrence do a pretty good job of it. I mean, they're not bad actors. Movie!Magneto also seems a lot more cohesive as a character, which is probably because the screenwriters have had, like, 50 years of X-Men canon to build on.
Anyway, I guess where I'm going with this part of the post is that Erik and Charles Xavier are some kind of sympostic culmination of good vs. evil-- they start out with the same idea, then go in wildly different directions as Erik succumbs to the temptation of using his mutant powers to get back at the people who have hurt him (i.e., humans). Charles uses his powers for good, Erik uses his powers for, uh, not-good. I mean, Magneto has a telepathy-blocking helmet to keep Charles out of his thoughts. It doesn't get more foil-y than that.
#1: Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader (Star Wars)
Darth Vader is my #1 top most favorite villain of all time ever. Ever ever. I haven't seen Star Wars in a million years, but the depth of this guy's evil is still rattling around in my brain. Darth Vader is great.
So, spoilers: Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker, protagonist Luke Skywalker's father. This was the biggest twist in cinema, like, ever when Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. It was chronologically the second movie to come out of the six-film series, so I understand. But having seen all the movies in order (or in Flashback Order), I just have to say: really? People were surprised by this?
There are so many parallels between Luke and Anakin. They're both ambitious Jedi, they both want to prove their worth, they both want to learn to master the Force. Luke even wants to be like his father (at which point his aunt and uncle basically look at each other like they're on The Office).
Anakin Skywalker is like the classic villain archetype. Everything's cool, suddenly one day your wife dies and then boom, you build a giant super-laser in space and blow up an entire planet. That's it. That's Anakin's villain arc. He has a super clear motivation for wanting to take over the galaxy (which I admit to having simplified a bit). His protagonist is extremely protagonist-y. He wants the exact opposite of what Luke wants. And the icing on the villain cake is that they were related the whole time! The son is once again atoning for the sins of the father!
Maybe I just have a villain type.
No comments :
Post a Comment