Continuing on the topic of last time, there are different types of villains. In the last mini-essay I shared my thoughts on the redeemable villain, the one who has his own journey of development and realization as his life is transformed. This time, I wanted to cover the flip side of that. The unrepentant, the unscrupulous, the unforgivable, pure evil, true villain.
I know I named a lot of different things, and frankly could have gone on much longer with the aid of a thesaurus and more patience, and I would have still not considered that lead in to be too long. The reason for that is because a good pure, through-and-through villain can still be complex. They don’t have to be as simple as having a single-minded focus, having only one objective, or being stagnant. An unrepentant villain, that you can expect to never even slightly entertain the thought of transforming into a good or even neutral character, can be very dynamic. In some ways, it is even harder to create an engaging pure evil villain than one that has a redemption story.
A character with a redemption story can be expected to have a winding arc of ebbs and flows of morality and conscience as they face issues that challenge their convictions. A pure evil villain doesn’t have all these side struggles to make their story more interesting. They also may not have the same complex motivations and many create a pure evil villain simply to make them evil for the sake of being evil … the required adversary to their beloved hero. This can make a pure evil villain seem bland and call into question why they’re doing what they’re doing.
On the other hand, a good villain doesn’t need to be deep. They don’t have to have complex motivation that drives them to do what they do. Many villains in real life simply do what they do because they want more wealth or power. They don’t have any traumatic events that drove them to crime or unfortunate circumstances that they can claim forced them into committing even heinous acts. This is a trap that many make when trying to craft a believable villain. The creator will create a sad story to explain why the villain is why they are, a way to justify their behavior, or simply try to make them relatable.
The best villains don’t have to be relatable. They don’t have to be someone that readers are sympathetic towards. They just have to be engaging, entertaining, and memorable. Engaging means that the villain is active and feels like they have a significant role in the story. Entertaining doesn’t mean that the character is a clown, but that something about their mannerisms or personality adds flavor to the narrative and helps shape it. A villain can be dry and stale but if subtle reactions to things are described well, particularly if there’s a greater significance to what’s going on, then they can still be entertaining.
Memorable is largely what a character is if the first two items on the list are met, but it goes a bit deeper than that. Memorable also extends to the overall delivery of the character and how they stand out from their surroundings. You can easily dive deeper into other aspects that make a character memorable, but it sums up a number of different things that are harder to nail down and wouldn’t apply to every villain. It’s simpler to say that a great memorable character is a driver of the narrative they take part in. If a memorable character is a villain, it is probably expected that their footprint or impact in the narrative is felt far and wide in the story, even beyond where they’ve been themselves.
All that is a bit of a tangent and wouldn’t seem applicable to what makes a good pure evil villain, except that it establishes a singular point. Of the requirements to make a pure evil villain truly great, being relatable isn’t on the list. Trying to justify why a villain is a villain by creating a set of circumstances that led to their downfall definitely isn’t on the list and doing so can also make a villain weaker as a character as valuable time and words are spent building the justifications rather than on building the villain in the current. Emperor Palpatine from the galaxy far far away is a perfect example of a pure evil villain. His is the very definition of memorable and, that I’m aware of, never had some justification about how bad circumstances and personal hardships led to his downfall, even in the expanded and legends lore. He is just evil, being essentially described as darkness incarnate in some material, and desires more and more power at the expense of all else.
Building on the example further, Emperor Palpatine is engaging. He has his fingerprints on every aspect of the tragedies that unfold in the Star Wars trilogy and prequel trilogy. Even after his death in the second Death Star, his legacy lives on in the sequel trilogy. As for entertaining, how many reading this haven’t ever heard someone quote or reference things like, “Unlimited Power!” or “The dark side of the force is the pathway to …” Well, you get the idea. Emperor Palpatine isn’t funny, but he is delivered in a very entertaining way as a character.
Beyond even all this, Emperor Palpatine stands as one of the most widely known examples of a true pure evil fictional characters in the entire world. He is unapologetically evil, cares nothing for other people except for how they can be used, doesn’t bat an eye or shed a tear at the destruction of an entire planet, and would gladly work a scheme to have even his closest servant killed in the full view of the individual if it means a chance to get a more powerful pawn. That doesn’t mean that every pure evil character should be an Emperor Palpatine that works things on a grand scale.
Even a small town thug terrorizing a few locals can be a memorable character if done right and the focus is kept on interweaving their threads through the whole story. Let their influence be felt and don’t be scared to let evil be evil. If you are making a character that you can relate to or empathize with because of how horrible events shaped them into a villain, then that deadens some of the impact of who they are in the present.
I’m not saying that villains should never have tragic backstories that caused them to go down the path of evil, just that it shouldn’t be forced onto a character. If you make a wonderfully complex villain and then tack on the tragic backstory that doesn’t really add to the narrative in the present, rethink it. A great many of the people who are regarded as horrible monsters in history didn’t come out of vast hardships and some of them had relatively comfortable lives or were wealthy. They weren’t forced into evil by things beyond their control, but rather chose it for themselves and embraced every bit of the horrible things they did. This is what can truly make for a memorable pure evil villain.
I know I dwelled on why I'm not fond of the idea of trying to make a pure evil villain relatable or someone that people could empathize with, but it is an important thing to address. It's so important in fact, that I plan to cover that specifically in a future post. That said, I have my heart set on covering a different and more entertaining topic. I won't spoil what it is except to say that if a number of these characters got together to conspire, they would likely be a greater danger to themselves than others.
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