fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2689 ]

[ SECRET POST #2689 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2689 ⌋

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Inspired by secret 5:
What does it mean when characters are evil for the sake of it? I have seen it be applied to characters who ultimately have "power" as a motivation, but that is still a motivation. Does it just mean that the character doesn't have a motivation that can be seen as good?

It means "I'm EVIL because I LOVE being EVIL because doing EVIL things makes me happy and GOOD things are ew."

I guess "sadism" is the most similar motive, but it doesn't have to be quite as focused or specific as sadism.

So, basicly, as long as the villain acknowledges it's evil and that's the appeal of the action?

Well, I guess the villain doesn't have to explicitly acknowledge it --- more if he doesn't show any other real motivation for being evil (see: a lot of cartoon show villains) or if any other motivations like money or whatever aren't sufficient to justify the extent of the self-indulgent evilness of his actions (see: a lot of James Bond villains) that the only logical motive that can be found is that he's doing it for the evulz.

Re: A small question on what "Just for evil" means.

icecheetah - 2014-05-15 00:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: A small question on what "Just for evil" means.

intrigueing - 2014-05-15 00:27 (UTC) - Expand

Re: A small question on what "Just for evil" means.

icecheetah - 2014-05-15 00:30 (UTC) - Expand

Hah, I just sort of asked this same question over in that thread.

Oh dear...

Meh, I'd say it's more characters who are sadistic and want to do whatever for the point of fucking over the happiness and well-being of others. With no neutral or redeeming characteristic.

My experience is that most people who make that claim about characters being evil just to be evil are doing it because they lack the desire or ability to look at said character as a complete person. Because it's harder to be righteously indignant about a villain once you've acknowledged that they're not one-dimensionally evil.

But the rest of the time, yeah. I've seen it used to apply to characters (usually one-note characters) who just want to rule and don't really have any reason or care for others.

That's interesting! And makes me wonder how many "just for evil" villains are more complex than people think they are.

I don't understand "Ruling the world" as a motive. Even if you ARE evil you still need to put in enough effort to make sure things run smoothly enough for you to benefit. And that's stressful.

Disney's evil Queen (Snow White's stepmother) is just wicked, evil, bad, and mean. There's no stated motivation for her to be evil. We're just expected to believe it.

That's evil for the sake of evil.

Mad Madam Mim (whom I adore) is a tricky evil-for-the-sake-of-evil character– she's bad because she just loves being bad. That's a motivation. Tricky, as I said.

Basically, if there's any stated motivation (i.e., this person became bad because...), then a character's evil has a cause and, generally, a purpose. They're complex villains and sometimes are antiheroes. Evil-for-the-sake-of-being-evil villains generally are not complex. They're just the Big Bad, and we're not meant to think more about them than that (and that the hero should kick their ass but good).

Snow White's stepmother's motivation was jealousy. She did her evil things because she wanted to be "fairest of them all." It's an example of an entirely bad motivation, but it what it is was pretty explicit.

Yeah, jealousy was her motivation for evil deeds against Snow White, but we don't know why she was evil in the first place; we don't know why she learned 'the Dark Arts'; we don't know anything about her except that she's SW's EBIL stepmother. That makes her EftSoBE.

Mad Madam Mim is literally the only thing I remember about the sword in the stone.

It's interesting that if a villains motive is literally "for evil", that puts them in a grey area.

I've known a lot of people who've remembered her vividly, but couldn't for the life of them remember the movie's title. I watched the movie so many times as a kids that the VHS tape got stretched. I want the DVD– they don't stretch!.

I feel Mim's a grey-area-dweller because she outright states that she's bad cos it's awesome. That's somewhat rare.

I would define it as being evil without getting any particular benefit out of it, so "power" wouldn't apply because that's a benefit. I would hesitate to even include characters who are evil by natural instinct or because evil is the purpose of their existence (like demons and fantasy species with an "evil" alignment) because going along with their nature instead of struggling against it is also a kind of benefit. So actually, when I think of "evil for the sake of it" I think of characters where there's no benefit and also no in-universe explanation for their evilness. In other words, bad writing.

If it's just bad writing then... well it seems a shame that the impression I get is such villains are common, even if I personally usually see a motive of some sort by the end.

Characters who do things because they are evil, or who do bad things just because. Like Luther from The Warriors. Why did he assassinate the gang leader, blame the Warriors and spend the entire movie trying to kill them? He just likes doing things like that. He's just a crazy, violent dude. There's no other motivation given in the movie, and there's not really any other explanation needed.

I don't think it's necessarily bad writing, though, unlike some. I think it's fine. It's different than other kinds of villains, certainly less complex, but it's not bad.

Anything can have a place in writing. Even things that are usually bad can sometimes just work in the story.

So yeah, not necessarily bad writing.

To me it means that even if they do have some motivation behind what they are doing, they will do evil actions that don't necessarily serve their purpose, but are just nasty. Like, Scar wanted to be king, and the vast majority of actions, evil as they are, are not random, but aimed at fulfilling this purpose. It's the actions that do not serve a particular goal but are just there for being nasty that I find push a character into evil for the sake of evil thing.

I dunno, even characters who are evil with no concrete gain do so because they gain some pleasure from it, it at least amuses them and they're selfish enough that that's good enough for them, and that's their reason. You never see a character who does evil even though it makes them miserable and accomplishes nothing that they want. Like a quote I read on the topic once said, "Even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason". So I wonder if there's really any such thing. I'm trying to think of examples and coming up short.

Oh, oh, I just thought of a couple! Aku from Samurai Jack. He's literally the very first evil in that universe and he does what he does because he exists to do it; he has no personal motivations at all (though he starts to hold a personal grudge against the main character for thwarting him). And the First Evil from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another personification of evil that behaves like a force of nature, not like something that has reasons for what it does, it just does it.

Those kinds of eldritch abomination kind of villains you only see in fantasy are the only things that are evil just to be evil that I've ever seen.

It means that the person describing the villain considers their motivation opaque and unsympathetic. Sometimes they're ignoring a perfectly good backstory because they conflate working out why a villain does what he does with "justifying" it, but sometimes people can't relate because the writer sketched out the villain's personality in the vaguest possible terms: their villain is a walking plot device who does things only to broadcast their awfulness to the audience and justify whatever the hero eventually does to stop/punish them.

Evil literally for evil's sake is really hard to play straight, because it often comes across as a flipped parody of people who do things they consider good in order to maintain the belief that they are good. A character who builds their identity on being evil will go out of their way to perform evil acts specifically for "what this says about them" and as a motivation, the compulsive need to prove their alignment can seem forced and inauthentic.

What can work better is having a character who's so alienated from and antagonized by the culture that tried to raise/indoctrinate them that they don't trust its assertions at all. They're more predisposed to treat people and things that are demonized by said culture as potential allies and resources than they are to be charitably disposed towards anything that it labeled good.

Motivations that get repeated over and over by authors who aren't really interested in their villains as people decay into a kind of pat-answer gibberish. That's what you're generally running into when you see villains who want "power" or to "rule the world". Power is the whole key to feeling like your existence matters, like there's any reason for you to be here at all. Villains tend to go from not having enough power (being acted-upon, humiliated, and victimized) to acting like no amount of power will ever satisfy them.

There's a class interest inherent in commercial stories. Trace it back to where the very words come from, and you'll find that villain originally meant villager. It's from late feudalism, when the aristocracy feared the subset of the peasantry who could congregate. They rebelled more and caused all sorts of trouble. In more modern terms, we're still looking at villains through the eyes of the "haves," internalizing their prejudices and pearl-clutching fear of being displaced by some hungry, ambitious upstart who isn't playing by the rules.

It's in that context that stories of someone marginalized and oppressed who turns into a *crazy monster* who wants to do to the formerly-powerful what was done to them first ... make a certain kind of sense. It's the context for evil witches, criminal minorities, sinister second sons in any setting involving inheritance, and so on. They're portrayed as illegitimately aspiring to wield a power that "rightfully" belongs to someone else. And they're always at odds with the prevailing, current thought in our world. In a society that holds up freedom as the greatest good, the villain will be depicted as overtly anti-freedom, whether that makes any sense for them or not.

I have nothing to add, but this is an excellent analysis.

AYRT

Thanks! I didn't know if anyone apart from the OP was going to read this, so your response made me happy.

Hahaha no not really, re: paragraph 5

The rest of your comment is good, but impractically theoretical. Being evil = hurting people, which pretty much short-circuits all justification and complexity because none of it really *matters* at all any more once you start hurting people.

AYRT

No idea if you're going to read this because I checked back so late, but respectfully, we disagree. Hurting people is not everyone's definition of evil. And technically, I'd assume yours has more to do with *which* people are being hurt, because most heroes enforce real-world sociocultural ideals with violence. It's "might makes right" hidden in a story dynamic where the good guy just happens to always be the strongest one in the end. And the hero is often saved by circumstance from actually having to kill the villain, because modern stories have a superstitious horror of killing.

"Once you start hurting people, nothing else matters" overlooks the fact that most villains have been subjected to violence. They don't bring force into the picture so much as return it with interest. You're focusing on what they do and ignoring what was done to them, with the arbitrary belief that they should have been paragons of non-violence that keep your sympathy and the so-called moral high ground. But a villain, pretty much by definition, is a furious nightmare of a survivor who isn't asking for anything. They're demanding it and forcing the issue. And frankly, they're portrayed through a privileged group's worst fears about survivors, so they are unreasonable, insane, pathologically furious, and no amount of power will ever make them feel safe or content. They cut a path of destruction that puts a stop to everyone else's ability to keep doing what normal people had been doing, before the villain came along. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, a caricature. They're blatantly, obviously wrong so that people can keep believing the way society does things is right. It's easier to pick up on this if you look at the heroes and villains of a different era, whose prejudices and morals don't align well with yours. But then as now, it's ingrained in our stories to make The Problem one angry, unstable person and The Solution getting rid of them. The hero does what the whole group wishes someone would do, because they don't have any particular interest in addressing the injustice that created the villain. That violence hurt a minority. The villain is turning the whole group's collective life upside down. "Important people are being inconvenienced by this, so how dare he?" is basically what this argument amounts to. A big part of why villains resonate for some people, even as they alienate many others, is because they're willing to go "excuse me, I am an important person."

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[ SECRET POST #2689 ]

A small question on what "Just for evil" means.

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