The Convincing Villain
Good afterevenmorn, Readers!
Side note, autocorrect keeps trying to fix my nonsensical greeting and it’s quite annoying. Back to the post!
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. It’s dangerous. I do not recommend it. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the nature of fictional villains and morally grey heroes, and how to write them convincingly. While it’s sometimes fun to read a simple story where good and evil are very evident, and we’re all firmly on the side of the heroes here. The fight (and eventual victory) against Evil™ can sometimes be exactly the hopeful escape we need. Please note, I’m not looking down my nose at those kinds of stories. I enjoy them myself.
My favorite reads, however, are stories where good and evil is not so simple. It’s not all cut and dried. This isn’t just about creating complex characters to counter your protagonists, but also about creating a safe space to explore all the nuance that we find in real life. It’s a good, safe place to grapple with ideas of heroism, morality and villainy. What makes a hero? Or a villain, for that matter? If the end result is good, are morally questionable actions justifiable? What are we willing to sacrifice for the greater good? Is it acceptable if the answer to the previous question is, “Everything”?
I’ve seen a number of posts on social media talking about villainy, particularly in the DC universe. Of particular note was Poison Ivy. Is she actually a villain? Isn’t her whole schtick fighting companies responsible for destroying our planet? I’m sorry, that doesn’t sound villainous to me; particularly in light of the absolutely abhorrent things corporations do in order to save a few dollars and maximize profits. It’s also (usually poor) people who suffer as a result. Granted, she is what we would call an eco-terrorist. Sure, people working for those corporations are just folks trying to earn a living. But the destruction of the natural world is no joke, and for all the Poison Ivy hurts people, the companies she’s fighting against do the same, or worse. But they do it in the name of profits, so it’s somehow acceptable? A little like in real life, it seems.
In fact, writer J.T. Klune makes mention of the line she rides:
The thing I love most about Poison Ivy is her walking that line between bastion of Mother Nature and psycho eco-terrorist. She sees herself as the hand of Mother Nature. If Mother Nature were “God,” then Ivy would be her “Jesus.” She defends the defenseless nature of the world and truly believes in her cause. Maiming, mauling, and mutilating are extreme measures, but it’s nothing compared to what irredeemable cruelties humanity’s done to the world of nature. Ivy always sees the greater good as she punishes those who deserve it.
She’s absolutely psychotic, sure. But so are these corporations who are literally poisoning the world (and the poor communities in their way). It might be extreme, but she’s literally trying to save the planet.
Is she actually a villain? If you were a person living in one of those forgotten communities in which a corporation was dumping raw sewage or heavy metals into your water supply because they want to save a few bucks, wouldn’t you want someone fighting for you? What about if you were an indigenous person in, say, the Amazon, whose lands are being obliterated for some mine or other. Would you not want someone in possession of the powers of the Green fighting back? Especially if the legal and legislative routes are so bought up by those same corporations, there appears to be no other way to save your little corner of the world? There is no doubt that those killing our planet for profit are actually villainous. Poison Ivy puts herself in their way. Isn’t that what a hero does?
Questions of whether the means justifies the end are precisely the point of this thought experiment. Could killing some people to save the literal world be justified in this case? What about other cases? Is it ever?
Poison Ivy is often presented as the villain because she’s in direct opposition to the hero — Batman. But is Batman actually the hero and not the villain here? What exactly is he defending? Not the poor people whose lands and waters are being poisoned, that’s for sure.
As an aside, a slight shift in perspective lands Batman in general firmly in villain territory. He’s rich as all get out, but instead of improving the lot of the desperate people of Gotham, who might have no other options but to turn to crime (which would literally plummet the crime rate), he instead spends his enormous wealth on cool gadgets so he can go beat those people up. He does nothing but work to maintain the status quo (and the status quo is not great, actually). His parents’ death is not the beginning of his hero’s journey. It’s his villain origin story. Just something to think about.
This can also be said of Killmonger in Black Panther. He cause was absolutely righteous. In fact, it was so righteous, that most everyone who left the movie, in my circles at least, said something along the lines of, “He wasn’t wrong, though.” In fact, I think the writers painted him as such a sympathetic villain that they had to make him do something randomly terrible to remind the audience that he’s actually a bad guy. No really. See? He killed his girlfriend. What a villain!
Thankfully, the writers of Black Panther were well enough aware of this, and created a reasonable foil for Kilmonger in T’Challa, who at the end of the movie confronts the spirits of his predecessors, angry at how wrong they were.
There is a line of a show I recently watched that has stuck with me (and prompted today’s post), and it’s this:
How do you know that what I am doing is evil and not righteous?
And that’s what I think is the crux of writing a good “villain.” Would what they’re doing, given any other perspective, be considered righteous?
Are they, in this case, only the villain because they lost the fight? Would the story have been very different if they came out victorious? Might we all be better off if they had won, actually?
There is a whole treatise to be written on whether classic heroes are in fact heroes, or merely defenders of the status quo.
We’re seeing this play out in real life at the moment. Freedom fighters battling against apartheid South Africa were made to be villains, until they won the fight and are now celebrated as brave heroes. There are groups now, fighting for survival, that has public opinion divided on whether they’re terrorists to be reviled or heroes to be praised. A man gunned down the CEO of an American health insurance company, and was loudly celebrated in some corners of the internet. Who is the villain? Who is the hero? What makes an action evil, or righteous?
These are all things villains and morally grey “heroes” permit us to explore. The stories that have stayed with me are those that examined, and often turned inside out, our conceptions of villains, villainy and righteousness.
So, who are some of your favorite villains? Who do you feel is wrongly vilified? Sound off below!
When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and cuddling her cat. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and a cuddling furry murderer. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. Her serial The New Haven Incident is free and goes up every Friday on her blog.
I think that the matter of judging hero or villain involves the issue of culpability of the target of their action. If we can establish that the target is connected to the situation in a manner that is not morally defensible, then they become fair game for the agent of the action. If not, then the agent is acting wrongly. It is what makes the Runaway Trolley problem so intractable, as no one on either track “deserves” to be run over by the trolley car.
Of course, judging culpability is not always easy. Big-time, ruthless corporation despoiling the landscape for profits? Easy. Small-time workers welding pipe inside the Death Star? Hmm. For me, the more unfortunate situation is using the culpability or even its ambiguity as a rationalization, cheering on the exploding Death Star without needing to think about the day workers, cracking eggs to make omelets and all that. On the seventh day of Passover, the psalms of thanksgiving, the Hallel, are shortened, in recognition of God’s pain at drowning the Egyptians in the Red Sea, even as the Israelites escape. Heroics are seldom as purely pretty as we wish them to be.
“Heroics are seldom as purely pretty as we wish them to be.” Absolutely.
I’m afraid my first thought is to look at this as a philosopher rather than as a litterateur, and say that if it’s not worth giving up A to get B, then by definition B is not “the greater good.”
On the other hand, and this is where storytelling comes in, it’s not necessarily evident which of two things IS the greater good. I think we can value things in ways that aren’t commensurable with each other, so that putting them on the same scale is difficult or even agonizing. So we may not be able to decide whether A or B is the thing we want to give up—and that’s where you get the possibility of tragedy and of inner conflict.
What gets to me is the now-common trope among villains that “they have no choice but to turn to villainy.” Everyone is the hero of his or her own story, everyone does what he or she chooses to do for logical reasons, yes, that’s realistic. That’s sympathetic and convincing. But having no choice other than to do evil? No. There is ALWAYS another choice. Holding that “there is no other choice” is where suspension of disbelief breaks and sympathy ends.
There’s a whole thing about arguing whether or not a parent who steals bread for a starving child is good, evil, right, wrong…. It supposedly reveals whether the arguant is an ends-justify-the-means person or not, and whether the arguant is a kind person or not. But, really, the argument is a logical fallacy, because it assumes that “justice” and “mercy” are mashed together into the same concept, and that ameliorative reasons for committing the act somehow have an impact on the nature of the act itself. No. Stealing is wrong. Did you do it? If yes, then you committed a wrong act. If you did it in pursuit of a right outcome, that means I can give you a break on your sentence– send you for community service and mandatory training, rather than shove you in a jail cell. But your reason for committing the wrong act does not make it any less wrong. If you stole bread for a starving child, you chose against continuing to ask others for that bread, or asking if you could harvest something a person wasn’t using, like dandelion leaves and roots to make a nutritious stewed mash for your child.
There is always another choice than to do evil, always another choice than to become a villain. That other choice is often the harder choice (“If I tell the truth about breaking the vase, Dad will blow up, Mom will have to argue for a reasonable repayment scheme on my behalf, Aunt Marcy will be heartbroken, Uncle Ralph will spend hours in his workshop trying to repair it… so much simpler to blame it on the dog, whom everyone will scold and then forgive.” “If I don’t take this blanket right now, while the weaver isn’t looking, then my daughter spends another night with nothing but me to keep her warm, and tonight’s frost might be the death of her.” “I’ve got to earn this money. Either I spend six months in the papermill, or one night agreeing to the degradation of my body.”), so hard it might seem impossible, but choosing the easier choice not only involves committing a villainous act, it also involves denying all of the opportunities the harder choice would open up.
Your treatise asks whether killing a small group of people to save the entire world could be considered a righteous act. Assuming the small group is unwilling to sacrifice itself, what about the limitless potential of each member of that small group to think of a different way to save the world? What about the fact that killing the small group in time-crunch-now-now-now could well have been rendered moot by a little patience to realize tomorrow that the doomsday mechanism is fatally flawed and can’t work in the way threatened. To assume the right to sacrifice another person is to judge that person as worth less. (There’s only one small gap that distinguishes “worth less” from “worthless.”) The perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks thought it was fine to save the world/promote the caliphate by sacrificing the small group of people in the World Trade Center towers, the planes, and the Pentagon. The people sacrificed were worth less to the perpetrators than anyone else (they’re still holding to that opinion in their ongoing court case). The Persian army thought it was OK to sacrifice the vaunted 300 who were standing in the way of saving the world by solidifying it under Persian rule. The only time I can think of that sacrificing a small group to save the world was righteous, was when the group-size was 1 person (Jesus) and he was willing. If the sacrifice is not willing, the act unrighteous, and sometimes it’s unrighteous even if the sacrifice is willing.
This “no other choice” paradigm is an illusion, a lie, a prevarication. There is ALWAYS another choice. Villains just don’t want to pay the price of making the other choice.