Dark and Gray Character Development

1. Dark and Gray Character Development The Villains are people too!

2. Introduction • As important as, or perhaps still more important than, the heroes, are the villains of the story. To quote Jim Moriarty in the acclaimed BBC TV show Sherlock, “Every fairytale needs a good old-fashioned villain. You need me.” • Heroes can be easy to develop. It’s very simple to create a character everyone will love. It’s slightly less easy to add in the flaws of those heroes, but it’s still easy compared with villain development. • Villains, on the other hand, should be complex, have motivations of their own, perhaps even full lives (and love lives) of their own. (Personally, I like a well-done villain romance with possible redemption even better than a hero romance, because hero romances tend to be sappy while villain ones tend to be more complex and somewhat intellectual, depending on the villain type.) • Villains make the conflict in the story, and without conflict you wouldn’t have a story. As such, the villain is very important. He deserves a little respect too! • So put on your evil thinking caps and let’s get started!

3. The Types of Villain A Quick Run-Down

4. Villain Types • Sidious/IT/Cluny the Scourge/MagudaRazan archetype. These villains are totalitarian, completely evil, and entirely ruthless. They don’t seem to have emotions, and they are more disgusting than amoral. They don’t often go on rage-induced killing sprees without reason, but they will do just about anything to attain their goals, often corrupting a “Chosen One” (such as Anakin Skywalker or Charles Wallace Murry.) Sidious always struck me as more cunning and conniving than intelligent, which is why I’m classing him here. • Complex villains who are good at mind games, such as Dooku, (evil) Xanatos, Tarkin, Al Misurata, Ublaz, Alvin the Treacherous (he’s much different in the books from the TV show!) and Robespierre. They often have class and prefer understated elegance to ostentatious decadence. They may occasionally have a fixation on a good character (aka Dooku’s fascination with Obi-Wan Kenobi.) They prefer talking their victims down to fighting, but can be quite deadly in a battle. These villains are heartless and truly amoral, charming and deadly sociopaths.

5. Villain Types, continued • The ordinary person who goes bad. He or she may turn out to be the worst villain of all, due to the corruption of initial goodness. For instance, something happens to one of the heroes and they go completely crazy. (This villain is different from the man who was a traitor all along.) I can’t really think of any of these in literature at the moment, but in history, Benedict Arnold is a good example. He was a brilliant general who went bad after his superior officer kept receiving • The redeemed villain: Darth Vader is a prime example. They often either die in the attempt to be good, or spend the rest of their life in trying to atone for their evil deeds. Other examples include Romsca the ferret, who lost her life in saving the Abbot of Redwall, and Ventress, who helped Obi-Wan Kenobi escape from Darth Maul, who would have otherwise killed him. I think that the real reason why these characters are nearly always killed off is because the authors really don’t know what to do with them after they turn good; and perhaps the characters themselves wouldn’t know what to do. The main exception is Blaggut, a character from The Bellmaker, who becomes a boatmaker on the shores of the sea after turning good.

6. Instant Boxed Hate Mix Just Add Water!

7. Just Add Water • There is one simple, quick, patented, surefire way to create instant hate for any character. It’s handy for villains, gray areas, and others. Normally, I don’t endorse a lot of writing formulas, but this is one that has never failed me. • The simple equation? Maltreatment of helpless, innocent random character + villain = instant hate! • To simplify, to create instant hatred for any character in a reader (unless you’re trying to make a character you plan to redeem later disliked,) the easiest way to create dislike for a villain or other “bad” character is to have them mistreat some poor, harmless, innocent bystander—like a little old lady or a child who never did anything to them. Have a character be cruel to a harmless, helpless animal, and feel the hate; people don’t like people who are randomly callous or unkind. (Brusque characters are entirely different, just so you know. ;-) ) • It’s especially brilliant if the main character starts out rather pathetic and helpless, since that way you can kill several birds with one stone: create instant hatred, and get the villain introduced, and the hero begun, and the main conflict started! Voila!

8. Alternative Means: Hatred by Proxy • If you prefer to go other ways, you can create hate by association (aka, since that fellow associates with a Very Bad Guy he must also be bad!) If you want the character to be attempting to redeem the villain, but at first be mistrusted, this is the way to go. • Another method of creating reader hate is by having a beloved protagonist dislike another character. • However, neither of these methods is assured to create hate. Sometimes readers like the strangest characters. The only way of creating definite dislike (which works on everyone but sociopaths) is by having the villain do something Very Mean to a Nice Person Who Would Not Harm A Fly. • The third means occurs when we don’t have a chance to meet the villain until the third act of the book, but instead of the villain being cruel to some innocent creature directly, a henchman does instead. Voila! Hatred by Proxy!

9. Examples Of Instant Hate In Fiction • The author Jude Watson uses the Instant Hate method in the Jedi Apprentice books to let us know that Xanatos is Very Bad News. Xanatos creates doubt in an innocent, very young Obi-Wan Kenobi, and effectively sells him into slavery in the next move. While the kid is unconscious. Whoa. Instant evil. • In the first book of the same series, Dave Wolverton something somewhat different. He introduced Bruck Chun as Obi-Wan’s rival, who was not nice but did not pick on someone smaller than himself. He was picking on Obi-Wan, who was about his equal at the time. Hence, Bruck is disliked, maybe even disgusts the reader, but is ultimately redeemable. (Though that didn’t happen. Bruck took a bad turn in a couple of books and threatened poor Bant, who was chained up to the bottom of a pool and drowning. We didn’t hate him until then.) • The first time we see Feragho the Assassin, the antagonist in the book Salamandastron by Brian Jacques, he tells his henchmen to “leave them to die” about two helpless baby badgers, his prime mistake. The next time we see him, he uses a throwing knife to cut a grasshopper in half, for sport, and laughs cruelly. Despicable. This guy is eeeeeeevil.

10. Why am I saying all this, anyway? • We play around with our readers’ feelings, and they love us for it (though, to be entirely honest, it’s really kind of more of a love-hate relationship at times... :-P) We are the masters of how the reader perceives our own little worlds, and they only doubt us if we do it poorly, so it’s well worth while to do it right. • Well, believe it or not, there is a reason. As authors, part of what we do is manipulate our readers’ emotions, partly by fun little tricks like this one. We use word choice, micro-expressions, and tiny forebodings to make our readers feel as we want them to. We use shorter and shorter words to lead up to confrontations, leaving our readers breathless, and alternately, longer and longer ones to lull readers into a false sense of security. We put our own little twist, our own little spin, on objective, neutral situations to give them subjective meaning. Instant Boxed Hate Mix: Just Add Water!

11. Further Development Digging Deeper into the Villainous Psyche

12. Mind Games • The villains may hold some sort of sway over the heroes at some time. For instance, the bad guy may be holding the hero’s love interest hostage, or be keeping their family, or some such thing. • Hostage situations are always tricky, but remember, if your hero is ruthless enough the villain should be aware that if he kills his hostage then his modicum of control won’t last long. Besides, there’s always the boomerang effect; heroes may snap and go on a rampage if their loved ones die or are brutally murdered. • The second type of mind game is more the villain trying to provoke the hero into anger in order to trick the hero into making a mistake. However, this is just as dangerous as the boomerang effect in the hostage situation. • Another type of mind game is when the villain attempts to sway the hero to his side by trying to show him that they really aren’t that different, or at least that they want similar things. (Pitch Black and Dooku, among others, are famous for this sort of mind game. • It makes for an interesting twist when the hero breaks down an evil minion by doing something similar—such as playing off an atrocity or telling them that “I don’t really think you’re evil.” • Remember, an intelligent and subtle enemy is always far more dangerous than a blunt instrument.

13. Inside a Heart So Black • Villains have motivations just the same as heroes do, albeit their minds tend to work differently. Rather than charging into battle themselves, they have minions to fight for them—those minions may be coerced, brainwashed, or hero (in this case, actually villain) worshippers, who only see that things are better under the bad guy than they ever had it before. Greed, pride, lust for power—these things work great to motivate henchmen. • Not so well to motivate the main villain. • I personally prefer villains who have a high motive, a grand plan—such as Dooku, who took the wrong road towards reform in the Republic. (Get the feeling I like Dooku much? :-P) Some villains take power because they’re hungry for it—such as Xanatos (who is my other favorite Star Wars villain—and hero) and Sauruman. Others take power out of a desire to do good, and then they find themselves corrupted (such as what happened to Dooku and might have happened to Gandalf if he had received the Ring.) • Pitch Black, the villain in Rise of the Guardians, is rumored to have been a proud general in the Guardians’ cause before he tasted the power of the Nightmares and was corrupted. I have not read the Guardians of Childhood books, but however Pitch got where he was, he’s still one of my favorite villains. Ironically, Pitch is motivated by the exact same thing that Jack Frost, the protagonist, is—he wants to be believed in. • He’s just going the wrong way about it. (Which is true of more villains than one.)

14. Failure To Predict • The villain’s end generally comes when the hero does something he or she did not predict and thus did not plan for. • For instance, Cluny the Scourge never foresaw that Matthias would cut the Joseph Bell down to land on him, and thus he released his hostage too soon. Palpatine did not realize that he was pressuring Vader to destroy him by attacking Luke. • Thus, the hero’s victory is the ultimate irony: the villains must be truly formidable, and yet at their core they can’t understand the heroes, and this leads to their ultimate downfall. This misunderstanding at the core of the villain is perhaps the saddest thing about the villains. • It makes for an interesting plot twist when the villain can see what the heroes have and is hungry for it, but can never have it, as in the Barrow-Wight in The Fellowship of the Ring, and even perhaps Dooku in Attack of the Clones. I think that deep down, Dooku misses being a Jedi and is hungry for the warmth of character that Obi-Wan has. But he misunderstands that, if he were to try and “convert” Obi-Wan to his own side, it would completely destroy that spark of warmth.

15. The Challenge • Villains… They can be hard to define, hard to pin down—for the author as well as the characters in the story. They have layers upon layers of motivations. They can be very mysterious. Why did they go bad in the first place? Were they raised to it? Did someone they love go dark, or die? Did they taste evil by accident—and then decide they liked it? • To understand your villain, sometimes the only way to really “get” them is to dive right in with reckless abandon. • Villains also have lives, histories. They may not want their histories to catch up with them, just the same as the heroes. What makes them tick? Only you, the author, can decide. Do you want a villain who has been seeking the secret of eternal life ever since his wife died? A villain who slaughtered a full camp of soldiers in a rage after his family was kidnapped or murdered? A villain who was raised to evil but desperately wants to be a good guy? A villain who met power and decided he liked it? • Then do it!

16. Further Reading • The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction, Jeff Gerke, Marcher Lord Press • Dear Diary, Do I Know My Villains? at The Upstairs Archives (http://erinkenobi2893.wordpress.com), my blog (this is the original post that led to this PowerPoint!) • Instant Hate Boxed Mix: Just Add Water at The Upstairs Archives, original post. • The Sonnet at Against the Shadows (http://nasrielsfanfics.wordpress.com), the blog of coruscantbookshelf (aka NasrielThreeb), a wonderful poem about a woman who sees herself as the villain and who witnesses the actions of a young man who is very different from herself, as pure and white as a winter morning.