On Writing: Dark Lords! [ Sauron | White Witch | Voldemort ]

[Music] welcome everyone to this year's dark lord annual conference we're here to discuss the past year's achievements now according to our records we have been at least 22 percent more dark 30 percent more lordly and 50 percent more dead protagonists parents i think it's been a very successful year and i would like to thank you all for your support any questions yes palpatine uh no no we've heard that story before yes we know about him thank you very much it's been a wonderful year all the best killing and uh being dark and lordly for the future so here's to the next year cheers we've got five topics for today and the time stamps are on the screen now good versus evil character arcs dark lords of people too creating an active villain and establishing the dark lord as a threat let's just jump into it oh and uh cheers to the writing and worldbuilding software campfire for sponsoring this video really cool of you guys and i'll be reviewing campfire at this time near the end of the video part 1 good vs evil i think dark lords get a bit of a bad rap for their stories being one dimensional i mean this is the era of a game of thrones where your protagonist has to either murder a child or burn people alive so a lot of people have come to see dark lords and good vs evil stories as boring and morally simplistic those people are wrong here's why stories like game of thrones focus a lot on grey morality questioning human morality with protagonists who do bad things and antagonists who do good things stories featuring irredeemably evil dark lords are not as equipped to do this because we are pitting the characters against an unquestionable evil but this does not mean that your story has to be morally simple and the two best examples here are sauron from the lord of the rings and the dark one from the wheel of time saron's role as the dark lord is not about questioning human gray morality but about questioning the nature of evil itself the clearest example of this isn't how the one ring is destroyed with a gollum fighting frodo for it and then dancing over the edge destroying the ring and killing sauron tolkien believed that evil is not undone by the great and powerful or war but by small acts of kindness specifically he emphasized mercy it was pity that stayed his hand pity and mercy not to strike without need and he is bound up with the fate of the ring the pity of bilbo may rule the fate of many yours not least frodo and bilbo both spared gollum's life and it is those acts that allowed the ring to be destroyed this reflects tolkien's very catholic beliefs about the importance of mercy there is a lot more to it but this is a morally complex story about good and evil just in a different way to what we might think in the wheel of time the dark one takes on numerous forms throughout the series but jordan uses the dark one to explore and contrast the difference between cosmic or necessary evil that we need for free will to exist and human evil which is petty emotional and portrayed as childish unlike sauron the dark one isn't cruel but more a force of nature one character called the betrayer of hope in the series is elevated by the dark one once he surpasses that childish evil and understands the importance of cosmic evil jordan's story comments on how evil is not to be destroyed but must be challenged contained and controlled both authors use a dark lord to communicate complex themes around the nature and role of evil this is what gets readers thinking and this is where a lot of dark lord stories fall short they lack that deeper meaning and purpose to their pure evil meaning the story can come across as simple boring and lacking nuance hell even the original dark lord satan has this one down if writing a pure evil dark lord what else are you saying about good and evil through their role in the narrative part 2 character arcs some stories use pure evil characters to develop their heroes doctor who features a race of pure hatred called the daleks and the daughter is put in a position where he can wipe them all out commit genocide himself like they would the doctor believes that he should not kill at all and is here forced to decide whether he is quote a killer or a coward whether he should break his personal law not to kill and instead take vengeance only pure evil pushes this ark to its absolute highest point of tension because there is no redemption for this dialogue there is no talking to them killing them is the only way to stop them and it forces them to decide who he is on that most fundamental level the conclusion for the doctor is coward he can't kill them and he views this as weakness in himself just because your villain is pure evil does not mean that your protagonists have to be pure good and coming up against that pure evil can test the limits of that whether they will torture whether murder can be ever justified and whether vengeance changes the morality of an act if you're going to have a pure evil antagonist how do they increase the tension in the main character's arcs by being pure evil rather than just a thing to defeat connected to this is the concept of a character foil this is where a character's traits contrast with another character usually the protagonist highlighting the differences between them in a sense rowling wrote voldemort to be a foil for harry both start out similar as magically gifted orphans who find a home at hogwarts but that similarity highlights their differences harry acts with love loyalty and friendship where voldemort is incapable of understanding the power of love to the point that it leads to his defeat twice harry's ultimate sacrifice at the end for his friends and the deathly hallows is the embodiment of that love rowling's character foil does two things here firstly it helps define and understand our main character and secondly the contrast helps communicate rowling's most persistent theme the power of love by basically comparing two like-like cases this is especially the case for fallen hero dark lords who once tread the same path that the hero now walks as a character foil their similarities will challenge the hero to ask who they are and where they're going or in rare cases it makes the dark lord question who they are and where they're going when they notice the differences between them alongside their similarities this often connects to the trope of we're not so different you and i and that can be really fun to play with if your dark lord and your hero actually share some genuinely similar struggles or goals and not just some vaguely similar plot-pointed backstories consider who your dark lord might act as a character foil for which traits they will highlight despite their evil which traits they will challenge and which themes they will help articulate through their difference and contrast part three dark lords are people too okay so this one is a little iffy because there's only so far that you can humanize a dark lord before they are no longer kinda truly a dark lord still hashtag darklord writes i mean cersei is a right royal benevolent mother but she's not a dark lord despite the sweeping black robes army at a command and excessive amounts of wine but the point is despite trying to do a clearly evil thing in your story that doesn't mean that that has to be all there is to them let's have a look at this dnd alignment chart characters like morgoth from the silmarillion otherwise known as the bible for nerds are closer to chaotic evil the true unadulterated evil dark lord archetype the dark one though from the wheel of time is much closer to neutral evil he's a force of nature otherwise largely apathetic to the workings of people i think kira from death note is basically a lawful evil dark lord he has a personal code of honor to kill only people he deems as criminals and corrupt at least at the start but he kills a lot of people across the series and he views himself as this god-like being andy pretty much kind of is not every kind of evil is cruel malicious dungeons and torture style evil so there is a small ambit to how they might operate morally but remain a dark lord but there's also just characterization thanos and in-game takes all of the dark lord boxes he's got minions evil aims enemy of all life narcissistic psychopath but we also see that he loves gardening he enjoys the sunset and he has somewhat genuine feelings for his daughter a desire for power doesn't mean a dark lord can't love the violin or turkish delight or learning dead languages or bacon in the morning or forcing people to outer planetary colonies just to see if they will succeed or die the addy head and cornelia fung sinclair trilogy did fall in love once and desperately wanted a son to continue his legacy the white witch from the lion the witch and the wardrobe collected her petrified victims forms into a courtyard to keep them on display because she thought they looked pretty little details like that defining the type of evil and giving your dark lord character traits outside of their evil can help them come alive and it's not about making them relatable no it's about making them interesting we don't just love reading characters that share the same moral concerns as us i mean i love creepy scandinavian serial killer fiction because the serial killers are really creative and i find that compelling and fun to read don't read too much into that we have seen more goth a thousand times before so consider something different part four creating an active villain [Music] like all rich fathers dark lords are notoriously distant they'll send out minions and henchmen but only show up for your birth i mean um uh for the final battle this can work in some books and we'll get into those stories in a bit but generally villains who are present in the story and making decisions that drive the scenes tend to be more compelling in science festivals the chestnut man which is one of those creepy scandinavian books that i love the chestnut man murders numerous people throughout the story he creates tramps misdirections and actively undermines the investigation at every step the villain derives where the story goes and that gives them agency and makes them seem competent and the story remains tense because the heroes are always on the back foot being the threat that the heroes directly confront throughout the story makes the conflict more personal intimate and the eventual losses and triumphs over them more meaningful it's the reason we are more immersed in zuko versus azula and frodo versus the ring than we are in ozai versus eng or aragorn versus sarum azula in the ring have been around if possible whenever there's a high point in tension or conflict in your story ask whether the dark lord can be there in person instead of their henchmen letting that moment build into their personal conflict or if they aren't there then why not and that leads us onto part 5 establishing dark lords as a threat there are two common reasons that you might not use a dark lord as the antagonist that the heroes repeatedly face firstly a lot of authors who use dark lords have recognized that it can be helpful to have a more human villain on hand leading to the henchmen like darth vader the forsaken zuko or lucas stalin and percy jackson and the olympians who all have some level of humanity in them redeeming qualities and more understandable motivations this allows for a variety of character interactions arcs and scenes between protagonists and antagonists that you may not otherwise have available the key is using that opportunity simply having another pure evil lesser villain with no nuance just needlessly splits the narrative tension between the dark lord and the surrogate dark lord making them both less compelling an incredibly common trope that emerges from this is the henchmen turning on the dark lord either because they feel unappreciated or because they have a change in heart both of these can be more compelling than simply facing down against a dark lord and the second reason that authors often hold off on the dark lord themselves descending into the fray is to build anticipation antagonists need to be established as a threat by a showing the heroes losing to them b hurting the heroes in a way no one else can and c demonstrating they are strong where the heroes are weak consistently losing to the heroes book after book really undermines this i mean no one ever truly buys that doctor doofenshmirtz is a threat do they so it can be effective to hold them back for a bit to let that build up before you roll them out that said an off-screen presence still has presence throughout the harry potter books a lot of emphasis was put on not saying voldemort's name likening him to a ghost that might appear and in the wheel of time there are myths and stories that spread about the dark one that foreshadow his coming fear remains even when they're supposedly gone or locked away we meet characters who have been harmed by their followers or harmed by them themselves and that fear that we see in characters that we love and empathize with is genuine it builds that fear into us i mean this is just one of those cliches that i love but i love stories that have that return moment where you know the dark lord comes back into being those scenes are always so cool another technique is to put emphasis on escaping the dark lord rather than defeating them in harry potter and the goblet of fire harry has no chance to defeat voldemort rowling never even entertains the idea and he only survives by miraculously escaping writing it to be about escaping emphasizes the threat the dark lord poses and doesn't undermine them with repeated defeat one really important side effect of this narratively is that the readers will often become more invested in the conflict with that secondary henchman character rather than the dark lord because the characters suffer more trauma at the henchman's hands because of this reading that secondary villain's defeat can be more cathartic than seeing the dark lord themselves behind them defeated because they're just more emotionally invested in that other fight see there becomes a structural problem here the final third act climax can be less emotionally impactful because the highest point of tension is around a conflict that we care less about rick riordan solved this problem in percy jackson in the last olympian lucas stalin is the primary antagonistic force throughout most of the series he is the one that the heroes face over and over throughout the books even though the titan kronos is the one behind him he's the dark lord however riordan structured castellan's arc so that a the darkhorse defeat takes place structurally at the same time as luke's and b the dark lord's defeat comes out of the resolution of luke's arc keeping luke as the primary antagonistic focus of the series with kronos just giving his role extra weight this is also kind of what happens in star wars return of the jedi the focus remains on vader and luke sanderson however gets around this problem differently and missporn the final empire by using mystery we don't really face the lord ruler until the very end of the book and for the majority of the story we've faced those lesser villains that we should be more invested in but sanising doesn't pin the tension on a personal conflict so much as he pins it on a mystery during the climax this mystery is unveiled and the tropes of the one weapon that can kill the dark lord the prophecy the chosen one who he is is all subverted that's where the catharsis comes from where other authors use those structural changes to make facing the dark lord more interesting sanderson draws narrative intrigue from subverting our expectations about it i said i would review campfire the writing and world building software and if all you want to know is whether or not i recommend it then i totally recommend the base writing program if you think making character profiles and story timelines would be helpful and i recommend the world building pack especially if you're into making languages magic systems or if you're a dm they've built programs for those that i haven't really seen anywhere else and i really like them especially for languages i also really appreciate that it's a one-time purchase and not a subscription click the link down below is important to go check it out and it has a free trial if you just want to see if it's for you for my main thoughts i like how you can customize all the pages to describe what you want it doesn't force your story to fit any kind of formula i'm actually going to get the art of my characters commission so that i can have a full profile for each of them i think that campfire is particularly equipped for fantasy and sci-fi that's what they really designed it for and that's partly due to the timelines that allow you to lay out multiple points of view or map out the histories of your world or planets or universe or city its best features are definitely in the world building pack though the magic systems page follows stanison's three laws with a place for rules costs limitations a history and the languages page which is really cool allows for phonetics a dictionary your own alphabet which is truly impressive and useful for world builders the species page is also fantastic and flexible and i do want to mention that the items page which allows you to kind of create items that might feature in your world allows you to put in specific stats which to me says that a dm could really use this for creating items armor enemies and dungeons and dragons games especially in combination with the map function and that allows you to print off character sheets as well which is a real asset for dms i personally feel that the encyclopedia could be a little more intuitive and tighter and the map function would really benefit from some basic symbols like cities landmarks tunnels etc the character arc feature could also do with some tweaking to be a bit more useful so if you're looking to create pages for things that kind of come outside of those pages that they've already got built in then it's a little bit clunky but it is still possible but i do think that the core programs that people would use it for including myself are genuinely great at the least i recommend you going and checking out a free trial at my link down below but like every dark lord reflecting on their first defeat let's lay out what we learned in bullet points firstly writing a dark lord does not mean your story has to be morally simple use their role to say something about the nature of good and evil secondly a dark lord does not mean your protagonists need to be purely good consider how coming up against pure evil might intensify your protagonist's arcs and whether they can be used as character foils to underpin themes or define your characters thirdly consider how you can be more creative with your dark lords by finding a different kind of evil to what we've seen and by giving them character traits outside their evil that make them interesting to read about fourthly active villains are present in the story allowing the dark lord to be present instead of minions can intensify and personalize their relationship with the protagonists fifthly sometimes having a more human villain on hand can allow you to explore a wider variety of story threads it can also allow you to build anticipation anticipation can also come from an emphasis on escaping rather than defeating sixthly consider the structure of your climax when you have a secondary villain either making the more meaningful defeat concurrent or fundamental to the defeat of the dark lord or to draw intrigue from an alternate source like mystery but for now i must return to my dominion my armies await me and i will descend upon this land with lustful fire and indomitable will and those who resist me shall be crushed beneath my deliciously fashionable but definitely black boots [Music] farewell join me i am your sixth brother twice removed so so you

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 254,462

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, vader, voldemort, dark lord, harry potter, jk rowling, rowling, sauron, tolkien, white witch, darth, sith, star wars, writing, worldbuilding, lord, wheel of time, wot, dark one, morgoth, hobbit, silmarillion, frodo, legolas, narnia, lucy, edmund, aslan, kim possible, inkheart, adderhead, write, book

Id: UfVDkW0bqIA

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020