VILLAINS

When it comes to creating villains, I’m out of my comfort zone. It’s probably because of my extra positive personality. It’s not my thing to deal with negative stuff. I don’t like hard feelings, I don’t like bad, mean people, don’t know too much about them, either; I don’t get their psychology so much. It’s like, it’s hard for me to understand why people can be that way. Well, I actually do understand overall, life is not beautiful for everyone, depending on their circumstances. The problem is that getting in their shoes, empathizing with them, going into a deeper level—THAT is harder for me. That’s why, if I create a villain, it would feel forced. They tend to stress me out, in general, when I’m watching or reading them, especially when it comes to super hero villains. I find tiresome how writers have to be always coming up with how their villain will outwit the hero, and how the hero will overcome him anyways, but keeping it believable at the same time. I also find annoying and pretty childish how these super villains tend to have a motif which influences how they do their bad stuff.

However, there are villains who, even though they might stress me because of their evil, I respect and sometimes even enjoy. For example, Amon from The Legend of Korra. He really did spark fear in me, but I liked how he also inspired awe, there was some majesty to him. Even though he did not—apparently—have the power of bending (the power to control the elements, really useful in battle), he had remarkable skill in the martial arts that matched any bender, PLUS he had the power to actually remove that power. This made him feel truly unstoppable, and even more of a threat as a leader of an equality campaign against benders. The creators did a really good job with this villain, not to mention that his character design was really cool.

Now, there is one type of villain that I like best and with which I’m more comfortable as a writer, and it’s the kind that has a hard past, the kind that used to be good but changed due to a tragic or hard event. These tend to be more real, more believable, and more interesting as it’s more psychological. It’s the idea of a villain who’s got some good mixed within him. There are very popular examples, one being Snape from Harry Potter. The main reason why I like them is their passion and drama, which make them more romantic and thus entertaining. However, I don’t think that a villain should be given much merit because of how entertaining their story is. I think that the complexity of their psychology gives more weight, because that way it is more realistic, more solid, as human beings ourselves are very complex. Recently, I read about a villain who shares both of those qualities: it’s Shadar, from the video game Ni No Kuni. This character was once a wizard who served a powerful kingdom. One day, he was ordered to destroy an entire village, but he decided to rescue a child as he was horrified by the act. As a punishment for disobeying orders, his home village was burned in turn, not sparing anyone. This led Shadar to believe there was no good in the world, and thus become eee-vulll. HOWEVER, one interesting fact is that the purpose behind all of his dark acts afterwards was to end war—a noble goal, but through bad deeds. He became a fanatic. I was impressed by the powerful emotions and drama of this backstory as well as the complexity of the motivation behind this character.

Finally, there’s one other kind of villain which I find interesting, and it’s when you can’t tell on which side he’s on, or when he’s actually on no one’s side, OR when he switches from one side to another. I’m guessing that most people reading this would think of Deadpool as he’s extremely popular right now, but I’m not familiar enough with his character to talk about him. The only villain so far who—at the beginning—has left me very puzzled, was Axel from the video game series Kingdom Hearts. The main antagonists of the series is a group of entities, called Organization XIII. In one part of the story, Sora, the protagonist, has to go through a small group of members of this organization, Axel being one of them. However, he helps Sora eliminate them, but you learn later that they were actually a group of traitors who wanted to take control of their organization, and that Axel sought to eliminate them on the orders of the organization’s boss. So in the end of that chapter, Axel was really helpful, but was still on working on the bad guys’ side…or was he? Even though he gradually fell onto the good guys’ side, his actions and motivations weren’t very predictable, and I enjoyed the confusion he caused as an interesting hook onto the story.