Evil Things Evil Characters Do Evilly
 

So I've been kickin' around with a story and I came to realize nobody really gives a shit about my villain yet so I decided to find a way to give the reader a bigger hate-on for him. Then the thought occurred to me that villains aren't that easy to design sometimes.

Just look at Terry Goodkind, whom shoves as much evil as he can into each antagonist.

So I was kicking around a few thoughts and figured it'd be fun to ask: What do you like/would like to see villains to do to make them more 'love to hate' sort of way?

For me it's always been about making sure the villain totally enjoys what he's doing. I know it's a cliche but if you have a character who delights himself with how much of an evil prick he's being for torturing/killing/screwing with heroes it makes it that much better when he's beaten to shit later on. For example, Beast Wars Megatron, or the Joker, and the like.

Would it be totally cliche if he had an evil mustache? He so totally should have an evil 'stache.

But seriously, you could always go down the magnificent bastard route. Those are often some of the best villains.

Agreed. Also, it helps if he's not just evil for evil's sake. Maybe he has an understandable goal, or thinks humanity needs to be ruled with an iron fist because people can't take care of themselves, or is really just a pawn for some other force. If a villain is just evil for no good reason or other purpose, they tend to be rather uninteresting. Motivation is key.

Yeah, every villain, even say, the Joker has a goal. The Joker wants to show the whole world (especially Batman) that life is a joke. And perhaps that death is hilarious, but...

Oh, and I agree with EVILness. The "magnificent bastard" route is almost always good for a villain. Even in parody. See example: "Ah, your eating of that watermelon and paying of rent is all part of my plan!"

A thing you can do is make the villain's evilness more vivid is decreasing his evil acts in the big picture, but making it much more personal, cruel, and psychotic.

Thats just my thoughts on it, don't pay attention to me if you don't want too.

Oh, and does your villain have any particular hatreds? For a hero or group? Show him doing something cruel personally to the hero or group. An example of this that's stuck with me for years is the Trickster in the first Thief game. He plucks out Garret's eye. And Garret gets used to not having one eye, but he never fully gets over it, in the course of three games. The Trickster has a lasting impression on Garret and the player.

That is "good" villainy, in my opinion.

I don't know what you're talking about so I'm choosing not to care too hard but you are aware that for the effort you put into writing out [spoiler] and putting it into bold tags you could have instead written the first spoiler tag and then put a closing spoiler tag at the end of your post and had your statement actually spoiler-covered, right?

Yeah, I am aware of that. I just completely forgot about that while I was typing.

To be fair, in HTML you can leave some tags open like that and it will just make the rest of the text like that. Bold, italic, underlined, etc. The tags are the same except for they are brackets instead of greater than and less than symbols, so its an honest mistake.

On topic: Evil for evil's sake, like...Black Mage or Richard for LFG can be villainous, but in my experience it is usually used for comedy's sake, rather than to make them unlikable. Richard and BM are arguably the favorite characters in their respective comics.

So you'd definitely want a goal behind your villain if you want them to be evil and not funny.

Villians definately need to enjoy what they do. There's nothing worse than a whiny emo bad buy. The people who take true pleasure from tormenting others are the only truely "evil" villains.

Having a goal or ultimate end-game is also necessary, otherwise they're just evil for evils sake. Someone like Sylar from Heroes fits both of these critera perfectly. He doesn't care who he kills or who might get in his way on the path to more power and he definately seems to enjoy it.

He also doesn't think what he's doing it wrong either; he believes he's quite jusified in taking what others can't stop him from taking, sort of a survival of the fittest idea, so villains that don't think they're villains or that what they are doing is actually for the good of others is a good twisted form of villainy.

Another example of this would be Jack from Tru Calling. Where as the protagonist Tru uses her powers to save peoples lives, Jacks purpose is to prevent her from doing so in order to preserve the natural order of the universe (seeing as everyone who asks Tru for help has already died and their time is up). Both have valid arguments for their ideas and it's left ambiguous as to which side is "right", even though Jack is naturally depicted as the villain. But as far as he sees, these people have already died and everyone must die sometime, so they should stay dead. He recognises that it's not a nice idea, but it's never the less a fact of life and views Trus interferance as chaotic to the whole universe.

Unfortunately the show got cancelled before they really got too far into this idea, but it would've been interesting to see.

Dont do the "Tragic backstory junk" Its not interesting anymore. Also odnt make the character a nieztsche (fuck him and his name) wanna be. I always liked the more simple aspirations of vaillains, things like money, power, and immortality.

The main reason this villain-thought process is funny is because it reminds me of the NRA joke Black Mage did.

"Give me the power and that will make me worthy of owning it."