[ SECRET POST #2689 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2689 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 026 secrets from Secret Submission Post #384.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

Misfire, reposted above.

I can't figure out how my post ended up down here when I specifically hit reply to someone several threads up, though. :(

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

Dreamwidth does that sometimes.

You're fine. b( ﾟヮﾟ)b