Well my typewriter is down for repairs at the moment and I need something to keep me from being bored as hell because I’m off work for today and my husband is off at church and I think the cat hid my dildo so what the fuck am I supposed to do with my time?
Some of you may be surprised that I’m an author since I type about like how you’d expect a fucking dumbass ranch worker to talk, but I am an author, and I swear I can type good if I wanna.
Art, in all of the forms that it takes on, exists as the method that we humans use to understand and explain our viewpoints on reality. Reality and fiction in that regard exist in a sort of car and model car or gun and airsoft gun sort of relationship. It may be easier to understand, more accessible, and free of many of the constraints that the real thing is subject to. However, fiction still needs to mimic reality in one way or another because it is dependent on reality in order to exist in much the same way that a model car would have no meaning in a world without any concept of transportation devices. Art, however, can mimic reality in a wide variety of different ways. Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring gives a glimpse into the way people of his time saw the world both in the way the girl looks, and in the colors used. Picasso’s cubism on the other hand also gives a glimpse into the way Picasso saw the world, but yet people are more often confused by Picasso’s more visceral visual style. Villains in any form of storytelling, be it video games, books, movies, et cetera, can be written in different ways to fit the intentions of the author, however realistic or visceral the author chooses to be. This gives rise to there being a variety of good types of villains. In the body of this article, I will explain different types, how they are used, and examples of these villains.
realism
This is the most basic form of villain writing, and the kind that new storytellers should strive to learn and perfect first. It is often said that you need to learn the rules before you break them, so you need to learn to mimic reality in a realistic way before you learn more surreal techniques. The rule here is that reality is very complex and nuanced, even people with mental disabilities are complex with motivations that can be explained and understood. Most of the time, when you ask people what a good, well written villain looks like, they will describe this kind of villain; one that is nuanced, relatable, and rational. If the writer is very good at his job, he or she might even be able to write a story in which the villain is actually the good guy. As a rule of thumb, you should write a person first, and a trope later, and in this context, villain could be thought of as a trope where the goal is not to write a villain, but to write a human being with motivations contrary to the hero.
Examples of these villains include the Malfoy family in Harry Potter, the Woodsman from Over the Garden Wall, Croix from Little Which Academia
symbolic
Also called force of nature villains, these villains aren’t meant to be characters themselves, also they do often complement character villains in a work of fiction. Just as stated before, you have to know the rules before you break the rules. That is where these types of villains come in. The goal is not to write a character, but to have something symbolic of the concept of evil, or of another concept that you believe to be evil. They often manipulate more nuanced character villains, or act as some far off but powerful being that characters must unite to fight. Just as one fleshed out example, we have Zhaitan from Guild Wars II. Zhaitan is not a fleshed out character with a personality or clear motivations, in fact, the game hints that he has no free will at all. He simply corrupts and destroys. The storyline of the game follows your hero as he or she learns about the threats of elder dragons like Zhaitan, and unites different races, organizations, and governments in order to face the threat. Zhaitan doesn’t appear until the very end, making the idea of him far more important than him as a character, and he fills his role in the story very well without the need for complexity. Now, what Zhaitan represents is a subject of debate.
Examples include: Zhaitan from Guild Wars II, Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, and The Beast from Over the Garden Wall
antihero
The antihero is one of my favorite characters to write. Many of my friends say that I am an antihero and for how much I antagonize my own friends, I think I can see their point. Technically the antihero is a hero and not a villain, but I have chosen to include them to illustrate one major point. The only difference between a good villain and a good hero is who is telling the story. A good antihero can do both good and bad in different individual situations. It’s not uncommon for an antihero to even be an outlaw who goes out to fight for the greater good outside of legal constrains. Such is true for Han Solo who was a smuggler gone revolutionary.
Examples include: Han Solo from Star Wars, Amanda O’Neil from Little Witch Academia, and Don Draper from Madmen
“the enemy”
Some stories don’t have one specific antagonist, the villain isn’t one or two people, but organizations or ideas. War stories are often like this, the enemy of Call of Duty World at War isn’t Shichiro Tamagawa, or Kristoff Keller, but the whole of the Japanese and German armies. The closest you get to one single bad guy is a General Heinrich Amsel, but even he only appears at the very end of one particular mission. Just like with the symbolic villains, usually “the enemy” villains aren’t meant to create a nuanced character, but to be symbolic of different organizations and the things those organizations represented. These sorts of villains are often employed in video games where there is a need for there to be lots of enemies to fight.
Examples include: The Bandits from Guild Wars II, the French and British armies in All Quiet on the Western Front, or Republicanism in the Harvey Milk documentary, Milk.
Whether you are writing the plotline of a video game, a book, the script of a movie, or whatever other form of storytelling art you prefer, villains are as complex and varied as they come in real life. The goal is to make your reader look at your work, and to be able to spend time thinking about it and what different characters or organizations mean for the real world.
Anyway, my husband is home, it’s time to get knocked up, I can’t wait to see how you lovely bastards rip apart my dumb ass article in about an hour