What makes a good villian?
Anonymous said:
Writing question: What makes a good villian?
Also being Generic Bad Guy lets him be a straight man to the comedy of the heroes.
There are other stories where generic Flash Gordon style villains can be successful. Sometimes, all you need to turn a generic overlord guy into a cultural icon is a cool outfit and some asthma.
In the original Star Wars, Darth Vader was just Some Dude. He acted kind of like an old-timey pulp supervillain, but he’s not actually important in the grand scheme of things. Obi-wan gives us some backstory about how Vader was a former apprentice who killed Luke’s dad, but that doesn’t actually get mentioned again (the original Star Wars is great for using throwaway details like that to make the world seem big an epic. Unfortunately, Star Wars has become smaller with every movie, but that’s a different essay) In the original movie, I mean. Obviously it does in the sequels, but the sequels were made after Vader was a hit villain, so I’m pretending they don’t exist.
Even though that means ignoring one of the best fight scenes in all of genre movies, but that’s also a different essay.
Anyway, original Star Wars. Vader gets a cool entrance, makes some obvious deductions about escape pods, and Saturday Morning Cartoon speeches that “There’ll be no one to stop us, this time!” (Which implies that someone stopped them at some point in the past, a cool fill-in-the-blank detail that’ll presumably be filled in for us with the Rouge One movie because Hollywood hates imagination).
Later, after his troops let Luke escape, we see Vader in a meeting with some officer dudes. One of them insults Vader to his face, so Vader reveals his incredible ability to choke people with his mind from slightly further away than he could do with his arm, which is actually a pretty lame power. He can’t even choke the dude from across the room, he literally walks closer to get in range. Yes, Empire let him do this from across the galaxy, but we’re pretending the sequels don’t exist. He doesn’t even get to kill his minion like a real supervillain, because the actual bad guy of the movie makes him stop.
If you asked 100 people who the bad guy of the original Star Wars was, 90% was say Darth Vader and 9% would know it was the old guy but not remember his name. If he had cool armor, it’d be different.
But here’s the thing. Vader’s an advanced mook. He fails repeatedly in the movie, dialouge implies he fails a lot even before this movie (“No one will stop us this time!”). His backstory is generic “Evil Student turned on master” that’s been done a million times, and the only powers he actually displays in the movie are completely lame. His most impressive bad-guy feat is being able to kill a super-old dude, and only after the old guy literally lets him kill him. But he looks awesome. And “choking with your mind” is a cool power conceptually. And he’s voiced by James Earl Jones. So he’s a cultural icon. Even if all the writing was the same, if he looked like this
it wouldn’t have worked. But he looked cool instead, and the movie was awesome, so there you go.
And Vader wouldn’t be the last Star Wars villain to get popular solely based on looking cool.
Of course, most good villains aren’t Vader. So here’s something you might be able to actually use:
One thing I’ve found while writing is that people react more to kicking a puppy than blowing up Puppyulon IV. Or Alderaan, for that matter. If a reader can’t identify with villainy, it feels less “real”, and thus they don’t hate the character for it. A lot of cartoons are great examples of this.
Lapis Lazuli stole the fucking ocean, and tries to kill Steven and everyone he loved, breaking his dad’s leg in the process. Fans had forgiven her by the end of the episode.
Peridot tried to smash Steven with giant robot hands and worked for a program that was intending to blow up the earth. No biggie.
Jasper headbutted Steven and is generally kind of a jerk. This is unforgivable.
You can even see this dynamic in Legend of the Hare. Peggy murders an old man and a little girl in her first appearance, no one really cares. People actually ended up liking Peggy, because her villainy otherwise was kind of funny. Riley had sex with Jill and then fired her. Readers had a much stronger reaction to this. It’s because no one really knows someone who burns sentient rabbits to death, but everyone knows a Riley.
♫No one make girls think of a bad ex like Gaston!♪
But again, all this depends on the story you’re writing. If the basis of your comic is the heroes cracking jokes and having relationships, you don’t actually need or even necessarily want a memorable villain. The Marvel Cinematic Universe movies don’t, and they’re popular and acclaimed. If your villain is an important character, treat them like any other character. If you can’t make an interesting character, you’ve got bigger problems than the villain. If they’re not, maybe “good villains” are a little over-rated.
They do explain who stopped them in ANH — the Senate, with voting. Which at that point in time Lucas knew was a really boring thing to bother actually showing, and then he decided to do a movie about it.
An example of filling in a detail that would make that universe *cooler,* by the way, is to show that the Emperor tried to use the same trick twice: the first “rebellion” that gave him power was of his own manufacture, why not make the rebellion that gave him political position to dissolve the Senate entirely *also* his? But oops. This time it worked too well.
But I digress. I think you left out the inescapable tautology of drama — the thing that makes a cool villain cool is his or her coolness. Vader was cool because he had cool armor, and a cool voice, and a cool (literally dispassionate, which is weird lore-wise but whatever) attitude.
And yes, that was a huge factor in what made him a good villain — his coolness made him memorable. Which is sort of requirement zero. You can’t have a good, forgettable villain.
But I have to disagree with you on another point you make: Vader was a good villain because he was in control of his situation. In the structure of the movie, Vader was pretty much on top of things. He knew where the princess was, he knew she had the thing, he knew how she was getting rid of it, he organized his soldiers to find it, he made sure she stayed alive long enough to be “rescued,” he used his most inept soldiers to “foil” them, he killed the only one he actually cared about killing, he tracked the princess to her base, and he disobeyed orders from his stupid boss to go deal with the single actual threat they posed.
He knew his shit. And while he did let Tarkin stop him from killing the lt. mook, he made the point he actually wanted to make — roughly, “Maybe religion doesn’t make a difference to everyone, but it sure does affect your life!”
Now you could argue that Tarkin was really the strategy and Vader was just the muscle in all of that stuff, but that’s not really how it’s portrayed in the movie — Vader’s always got the center-stage, and while we get plenty of opportunities to see Tarkin being an idiot, we really only have allusions to Vader at worst taking it slow in his pursuit to personally choke to death every single person in the galaxy. (We even know Tarkin’s not his real boss, because the princess acknowledges Vader before she does Tarkin.)
Ben and Leia are intelligent, resourceful leaders; Luke is a kid with magic space powers; R2-D2 has the tech edge; Han has a special spaceship; Chewie’s a powerhouse. Vader has all of those things — in one character, all the strengths of the heroic group plus the backing of a giant faceless empire. If it wasn’t for the Power of Friendship, he would have won (and presumably stopped the laser at the last second, said, “Yo, I got this,” and gone down in his special spaceship and personally force-choked the entire Rebellion to death one dude at a time).
tl;dr. i know. it’s okay here’s the summary:
…and THAT is what makes him a good villain. He engages the heroes on their level (and does it in a cool, memorable way). All of the best villains are basically just the hero (or hero group) dressed in black (metaphorically, but also usually not), minus moral superiority and/or the power of friendship.