In Defence Of Pure Evil Villains

[Music] what do you mean kill the protagonist Mentor at the midpoint didn't work oh butter he's here I'll call him back azerothy eviscerator it's time to pay for your crimes oh Mr protagonist ah yeah you misunderstand me misunderstand you do know you killed a million people right oh uh what is that why is there sad music playing it All Began one day when I lost my parents in a tragic evisceration incident ever since that day I have vowed that no child will ever be orphaned again for you see I am the hero of my own story if you really cared about the children I don't think you'd have burned down that orphanage Amir manifestation of my childhood trauma I assure you for you see I burned down that orphanage for sympathetic reasons the staff of that place abused me most maliciously they did inflicting upon me the most cruel why burn down a building filled with children when you cared about them so much ah I see Mr protagonist no no you see I'm not reason for consistency no no the writer believes that pure evil villains are bad in every circumstance so ham visited in a sad backstory in an attempt to give me more Nuance The Narrative really required of me enough talk you killed my mother oh don't get me started on my mother for you see she appeals my most maliciously she did in fixing upon me stop oh oh evil villains are fantastic all the time people force in a sympathetic motivation in the hope of making the villain more complex but a lot of the time man like someone of Pure Evil incarnate would be the better choice I can't help but think of Jack Horner in Puss in Boots too you're not gonna shoot a puppy are you a jack yeah in the face why basically everyone loved watching him not despite the fact he was pure evil but because of it it's so fresh to have a story these days go against the trend of making every villain sympathetic sometimes evil just works but why and how do you decide whether or not your villain is oozing with nuance and sympathy or simply an irredeemable monster that is a surprisingly tricky question a great place to start is Lord of the Rings it doesn't just have the original Dark Lord that kicked off not just that fancy Trope it kicked off all of modern fantasy it also goes for an approach to Pure Evil that works really quite effectively we have Sauron the dark lord exists purely in the background while we hear about his deeds and plans seeing his armies do their thing we never get a close-up glimpse of him imagine for a second if we were given five cutaway scenes to Sauron as he tells us his sympathetic backstory how he was bullied by the other Wizards in the playground if we had gotten such scenes they would have been awful because they would have been ham-fisted in or to put it a bit more technically they would have been wholly irrelevant to the story in Lord of the Rings Sauron is uncomplicated pure evil but that honestly works because he is not really a character he is more so a force of nature in the books he has about four lines of dialogue when he speaks to Pippin through the plant here and that is it it's actually crazy how little page time Sauron got in that trilogy but that's fine because he has the exact same narrative function as the comet does in Armageddon or the aliens do in Independence Day the story is not about him it's about the protagonists working to overcome him if Tolkien had made Sauron all complex and sympathetic that wouldn't have done anything to make the quest to destroy the one ring any more fun for the reader for a fact it would have made the story less focused and took up a bunch of time better spent on Frodo and the crew seeing as they're the ones the story is really about there is a benefit to having simple characterization like this playing into archetypes like the wise Mentor or the evil Overlord because you don't need to spend much time with them for the audience to understand exactly what they are and the role they serve in the story if you're doing short fiction playing into the dark lord Trope might just work fantastically for you because you need only to convey that Trope is being used and the audience now has a clear understanding of who this character is and that he has some nebulous goal of world domination and Almighty wizard-like power playing into archetypes like this and exploiting an audience's preconceived notions of everything around a certain Trope can make your story much leaner as you now need to give far less setup and Exposition but you know what you can have a holy evil character take Center Stage have a ton of screen time yet work fantastically let's go back to Jack Horner it was rather fantasy and unapologetically evil villain the movie actively mocks the idea of having a sympathetic backstory you know I never had much as a kid just loving parents instability in a mansion and a thriving baked goods Enterprise for me to inherit more or less saying Jack doesn't have a sympathetic backstory he's actually lived a very nice life it just so happens he is irredeemably evil by Nature what took you so long idiot now with Jack Horner you can point at how he's playing into one of those Universal things that makes her great evil villains he's charismatic and is having so much fun another example that comes to mind is Claw from Black Panther he's having so much fun in all of his evil Deeds that we can't help but have fun alongside him now I have seen lots of people say this about Jack Horner and while I think that's true I also think that we can go a lot deeper here what works really well for Jack is how he plays into the theme that of learning to be grateful for what you have in the start of the film Puss in Boots Goldilocks and Jack Horner all feel no gratitude for what they have but as the film goes along Goldilocks and Puss in Boots have their arcs and learn their lesson here meanwhile Jack is static he never has a hint of being redeemed meaning in the end his death is actually really quite cathartic because it's a lovely way to tie off the themes of the story it validates the journey Puss in Boots and Goldilocks have gone on because we see in Jack Horner what would have happened to them had they failed to learn their lesson of appreciating what they already had now Jack Hornet Works fantastically but I think another super powerful way to approach making evil villains work is when the allegorical for larger ideas this can be highly effective if done right um as a great example take a look at Peter Pan and Captain Hook Peter himself lives in Neverland a place where he will not age and can be a child forever he has totally rejected the prospect of growing up for it's far too scary for him hook meanwhile serves a really interesting function he is Peter's negative role model instead of being a tradition National role model when Peter looks up to hook he sees a man he needs to do anything but emulate the man is bitter tyrannical and has totally lost his sense of fun Hook's mere existence facilitates the LIE Peter believes as he is the manifestation of every unconscious reason why Peter wants to remain a child forever what's really fun is when you look at hook he is terrified of the crocodile a crocodile where whenever he gets near he's accompanied by the sound of a clock here's a question why would a crocodile always emit a ticking noise that is such an odd detail to include in the end of the classic film hook even leaps into the Croc's belly and comes out holding the clock which is now ringing what could possess the original writers to include that detail well it's because this right here is another symbol the crocodile represents death the ticking represents time and the two combined represent the impending inevitability of death as it closes in on hook maybe it won't get him today maybe not tomorrow but it will someday Captain Hook as an adult is constantly under the threat of death it's something he's terrified of and is grappling with constantly meanwhile for Peter a Perpetual child when he hears the crocodile he reacts like this say captain you hear something death doesn't bother him but kids and the idea of his own mortality it's something he has yet to Grapple with he finds it terribly fun as the crocodile comes and hook runs in fear of it oblivious to the fact that one day it will come for him too to a degree to learn to embrace the inevitability of death is to become an adult you can't grow up until you've embraced this fact of course Peter wants to remain a kid because why would he want to end up like hook a neurotic hateful man who does not enjoy life living in Terror of the crocodile that will one day surely eat him in the classic story hook Works fantastically as a villain not in spite of him being a purely negative character but because of it of course the conclusion the seems kind of inevitably lean towards here is that the key is synthesis you do not want to be like hook obviously but you also don't want to be like Peter you want to be both this is why I love the film hook so much because in the beginning Peter has become Captain Hook effectively an adult who has totally lost touch with his inner child with no sense of fun everybody just shut up I'm sorry but Peter learns his lesson attuning with his inner child and in the end he goes back to the real world as this new version of himself as he's embraced his inner Peter Pan much to the joy of his family it makes for a wonderful Arc it is so rare to see an adaptation that takes so much creative Liberty yet also totally gets the core themes of the original and expands upon them in respectful powerful ways Captain Hook is Pitch Perfect for the themes the original was exploring so Pitch Perfect hook a film which is criminally underrated saw no need to reimagine him whatsoever because how can you improve upon Perfection so what I find really interesting is looking at the recent live-action remake of Peter Pan and how they totally screwed this up because you guessed it hook is now a sympathetic villain where he has a really tragic backstory and the writers tried really hard to get us to sympathize with his motivation of hunting down and killing a group of children what peeves me here is how the writers of this remake weren't clueless they understood the intentions of the original and tried to keep the allegories and themes intact hook even says in one scene to Wendy about himself this is not growing up looks like but while they tried to respect the original they did a miserable job at actually achieving that why well in the new film Hook was once a Lost Boy along with Peter in fact he was Peter's best friend but then one day hook voiced that he missed his mum and from that Peter threw a tantrum and banished him from Neverland not sending him back to his mum rather leaving him abandoned in the middle of the ocean because of this hook has now grown up and his motivation in the story is get revenge on Peter for his betrayal now does this make hook more sympathetic sure it absolutely does being betrayed sucks after all but here is the crucial question what does Hook's new sympathetic motivation of Revenge for being so horribly betrayed by his best friend due to bolster that original theme of his character the answer nothing not that I can see holding grudges is not exclusive to adults kids do it all the time this addition does nothing to bolster that original allegory making said allegory really start to fall apart here they committed a cardinal sin of writing here and that was seeing elements of their story in isolation failing to consider the larger scheme of things too many writers fall for this trap right here of throwing in an element that they like like making their villain highly sympathetic because they think oh I like this thing I want this cool thing in my story yet they give no thought to how well that element complements the other parts of the story the theme the protagonist's journey and so on a story is like a machine never think in terms of how cool can I make my villain this individual Cog be instead think in terms of how can I make the relationship between this Cog and the other cogs as cool as it can be the more you think in these terms the leaner your story becomes the more part Works in harmony with the other parts and I'd certainly argue the better your story is in the end you can have a sympathetic villain absolutely you can also have a pure evil mustache twirling bastard both can work but neither is ubiquitously the right choice now as a caveat to the idea of making pure evil villains allegorical You Want To Tread carefully here because it can go horribly wrong someone consulted me a while back asking for feedback on a story and I'm changing basically every detail apart from the ones that matter so no one can recognize it but the theme of that story was abortion is it good or bad which is a a very contentious theme to cover but it's also quite a rich one and it could make for a very interesting story if properly explored this person made a great choice in having one character take one stance on the theme of No it should never be done and the other main character had the opposite stance on the theme of yes it is a wonderful idea let's do it all the time this made them both proxies to one side of the the base enabling a full exploration of the idea everything they had on paper in theory was fantastic the problem lied in and yes I'm sure most of you can tell where this one's going because she made the person who was pro-choice a pure evil villain they made the person advocating for Choice a murderous sociopathic Maniac who manipulated everyone she came across and clearly the writer was trying their very hardest to make you hate this person the problem is this is called straw Manning it's when you have a bias as a writer so you were in Noble the size of arguments that you personally agree with only focusing on the good of those things then demonize the size of things that you disagree with only focusing on the negatives of those things as a result you are giving a dishonest exploration of the topic failing to resonate with the truth of things meaning your stories will not be impactful for it as a counter for example look at Magneto he is one of the best villains in all of comics if you ask me yet he's also highly sympathetic having been a victim of humanity at our very worst but he's embodying a larger idea the opposite of what Xavier is making them perfect foils for each other they both want the same thing peace and security for all mutant kind Xavier just believes this can only be achieved through peaceful cooperation with humans Eric meanwhile believes this can only be achieved through domination over humans the obvious parallel is Martin Luther King and Malcolm X these two characters are representing both sides of this Universal topic if you are part of a subjugated group how do you go about fighting for your rights do you seek domination over your oppressors or do you seek peaceful cooperation it would be sinful to turn Magneto into a psychopathic madman who laughs maniacally as he Slaughters civilians while having Charles be this benevolent lovely man if you did that you'd be straw Manning one side of the debate and so your story would fall flat because of it admittedly Magneto is an evil guy and he does kill people while Xavier is significantly nicer than Eric but their actions are still largely attuned to what someone of their stances on this theme would actually do Magneto is interestingly not a hate-filled man he only kills people when they get in the way of his larger motivation of securing the future of his people it just so happens that most of the time that involves killing the humans because they're in the way of that goal the truth is allegorical villains are a double-edged sword they can work fantastically they can also backfire horribly as a catch-all litmus test to make sure that you don't stumble here I'd say that you need to ask what best represents the way the real world is how best Can you capture the truth of things maybe that involves a complex sympathetic Villain Like magnesium veto or it involves a dastardly bastard like Jack Horner how villains play into the theme really needs to be tailored on a story to story basis just make sure that you never misrepresent the truth of any matter in your story but here is my biggest pet peeve with writers out there many believe that pure evil villains are generic that they just want more power or perhaps to have a nice coat by skinning some puppies and so if we follow them for too long such paper-thin characters will quickly bore us it is because of this belief that many writers will make the villain sympathetic because they believe if you want to make your villain a complex one they must be sympathetic or they will lack depth if you ask me this is total bollocks uh because if you have a character who is terribly evil purely so that does not mean they have to be simple look at homelander he is one of the best written villains we've seen in recent times I did a whole video a while back analyzing him which can check out by clicking that thing in the top right corner but despite the fact he is pure evil he has a very complex pathology going on he is a narcissistic sociopath who craves admiration and power these two desires of his conflict all the time where he has to control his urge to murder people or he will lose his admiration from his adoring public these conflicting motivations of his create some very powerful tension where we never quite know which will win out making him highly unpredictable and ever since he started to hang out with his son it's been really interesting to see how such an evil man goes about raising a kid and slowly corrupts him as time goes on while homelander is irredeemably evil he has plenty complex enough that he is still electrifying to see on screen scene after scene honestly getting an accurate depiction of narcissism like this in a superhero makes for a fascinating character if you ask me there's an ironic dissonance to be found because superheroes are meant to be selfless but homelander is purely selfish a fair few people have said the boys have started to get a bit boring these past few seasons and honestly I kind of get it actually but I don't think that's got anything to do with homelander not being complex enough it's rather because of a larger plot-based issue of how they've been failing to give us this feeling of progression on the large scale furthering this point let's say you wrote a story about a dictator in the style of a certain one from the 1940s whose name I cannot say or I will be demonetized so I'm going to call him Mr H from now on if you wrote a story following him and you truly nailed it where you properly depicted what such despots are like that sounds like a character who is oddly fascinating to follow in such a case you would have a character of Pure Evil but the idea of following Mr H do as he does as the viewer comes to understand his mind as they Glimpse all of the chilling subtle bizarre nuances of how such a depraved man thinks the that sounds like a fascinating character many people would find oddly engrossing one of my favorite foreign language films is look who's back and the premise is that Mr H is magically transported from the 1940s into the modern day Mr H is the main character of that film of course he is deeply hateable but my God the film touches on some fascinating ideas namely that the evil back then did not stem from this one man it stemmed from the people Mr H just so happened to be very good at galvanizing the people and riling up the monster within them and as Mr H gains followers in the current day riling up the masses entering the realm of German politics to great success it makes you realize the depressing truth that the evil from way back then was not unique to that era it exists right now and all it takes is the right man the right political environment and it might just happen all over again Look whose back shined a light on a depressingly insightful thing that I had never imagined before watching it and it did so with a pure evil villain as the main character anyone who pretends that pure evil mix will inherently unnuanced uncompelling stories is kidding themselves but more than theme and complexity of character there's another angle to this topic whether or not you have a pure evil villain should depend on your protagonist too again don't consider elements in isolation consider how to make them gel well with each other let's say you have someone like Sherlock Holmes a genius but he's also selfless he uses his incredible intellect for good I am talking about the original novels here not the sociopathic version we've gotten in so many modern adaptations well for a man like this he needs a foil a man who is his opposite so now we have Moriarty a genius yet he's also selfish and uses his incredible intellect for personal gain these two men are taking two extreme stances on the idea of if you have incredible competence in an area do you use your skills purely in your own interest or purely in the interest of others this creates a fun dynamic between them that allows itself for Endless reimagining I've got no doubt that in 50 years people will still be telling stories between these two characters but then this idea gets a little more nuanced when you look at characters like Joker and Batman again we have a pure evil villain an agent of Chaos versus a man of pure good an agent of order but crucially the Joker isn't just a great villain for Batman because he's his opposite he's fantastic because Batman believes he should never take a life not ever but Joker presents the ultimate test of that rule because he is the worst possible kind of human if Batman were to ever break his no killing rule it would be for the Joker a man of pure evil this is yet another reason why Snyder's Batman pisses me off somewhat because if Batman did break bad why was his first move not to come up behind Jared letters Joker and snap his stupid neck to all you Snyder Batman fans out there how the hell is the Joker alive in a universe where Batman has abandoned his no killing rule I'm just saying those people did not understand his character whatsoever but you know what it's true what they say a hero is only as good as his villain because every time Batman interacts with the joker it is the ultimate test of his moral Integrity two of the people saying sympathetic villains are always better here is a slam dunk answer proving them wrong because imagine if the Joker were sympathetic if he had a really tragic backstory and he has a daughter dying of cancer and he's only robbing banks because he needs the money to pay for her treatment costs oh my God that is a terrible idea it would ruin this wonderful dynamic these two characters have going on because that reduces the motivation Batman might feel to murder him meaning the Joker presents less of a challenge to Batman's character making him a worse foil for it I'd even go out and say that while whacking Phoenix's Joker was an interesting take on the character going forth the sympathetic route with him which did work quite well as a standalone story I can't help but feel that if he went toe-to-toe with Batman I just don't think he'd be as good a foil as the other versions of Joker due to him having that sympathetic touch to him the truth is pure evil villains can work fantastically but you should never throw one into your story just because you think they're cool you've got to think about how they play into the themes or how well they work as a foil for your protagonist all too often those two issues are surprisingly closely linked consider the Lord of the Rings approach of making them this purely background force all the Puss in Boots one of giving them the exact same floor as the protagonist making their a downfall caused by this floor all the sweeter because it validates the protagonist's ark or take the Joker approach of asking first and foremost how can I get my villain to challenge my protagonist as much as possible whether they be pure evil or sympathetic should really be an afterthought and if you need help in writing villains I made a skillshare course a few years back all about how to write great characters and I cover making great villains pretty extensively in that course I talk all about building characters from the ground up so that they compel your audience as much as possible and if you like you can check it out right now all you got to do is click my link in the description and be one of the first 1000 people to get a one month free trial using my link there are only so many spots available I couldn't recommend skillshare enough to you while it is today's sponsor I've been using it on and off for five years now because there are some really great writing courses on there it's a fantastic place to pick up new skills and hone your your craft and once you're done with my course you can check out the writer's toolkit by Simon van boy he gives out a lot of useful advice on that one not about character but about how to build the best habits possible as a writer and it's a course I found really quite interesting again if you're interested do click my link in the description and be one of the first 1 000 people to grab a one month free trial for skillshare grab your slot now before they go anyway do like this video if you found it useful keep writing and I'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 507,570

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Id: i1NMTuOizFo

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023