[ 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)]

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

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

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

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: what "Just for evil" means.

[(Anonymous)]

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."