Some villains are complicated. They're less villain, more antagonist. Their backstories are nuanced or tragic, their motives complex, their character, oddly relatable, and even sometimes, redeemable. This is not that. Today we're talking about Pure Evil. The villains you love to hate. Simple evil, Disney evil, evil because it's fun -- these are the villains with no caveats and no strings attached. Oh, and uh, before we get any farther I'm gonna let you guys know that this video was sponsored by WorldAnvil and I will tell you all about what that is, at the end. Now, you may have been told in your writing classes that villains have to be complicated or sympathetic, otherwise they're "bad writing," and this is a bald-faced lie. Good writing is any writing that works, and these villains can be absolutely fantastic and super effective. Some of the most iconic villains ever are pure evil, and they've never even made eye contact with a sympathetic motivation. To start off, let's talk about what makes a villain pure evil, since there are a few qualities that they almost all share. The first of these is unknown or irrelevant backstory. See, a Pure Evil Villain has a backstory, but most of the time it just doesn't matter to what they're actually doing. The most overt example of this is the Joker, who is very big on the 'multiple choice pass' thing. In fact, this is how he originally manipulates Harley Quinn into joining him. Since he doesn't care about his past, but he knows psychiatrists care about that stuff a lot, so he fabricates an appropriately tragic backstory to get her invested and win her over. Outside of 'The Killing Joke' he doesn't have a concrete past, and even then it's kept somewhat ambiguous if that's what really happened, anyway. There's also villains like Megatron, who had a complex motivation once-upon-a-time, but have long since lost sight of their original goal. In Megatron's case, his initial motivation was addressing the growing corruption of Cybertronian society, and he and Optimus Prime were even on the same side, back in the beginning. But after thousands of years of escalating war atrocities literally rendering his homeworld uninhabitable, and pumping himself full of evil, purple, crystals, he's long since abandoned the principles that used to matter to him, and is now just fighting to win and kill his murder soulmate, Optimus Prime. But beyond that, many pure evil villains just don't have a stated backstory. Consider Maleficent or Bill Cipher, who basically just exist to wreak havoc and do evil stuff. And yeah, I KNOW they gave Maleficent a complex and plot-relevant backstory in the live-action movie, but in the process they ruined her villainy and didn't just make her relatable, they made her a full-on good guy! Giving her a proper backstory and motivating her actions from it took away what made her such a good villain in the first place. Pure Evil Villains exist separate from their past. How they got this way hardly matters. This ties in to the next popular character trait: extremely simple motivations. Pure Evil Villains usually have motives, but they're usually really simple and self serving. Personal power is probably the biggest one, but other popular classics include: ruling the world, wreaking indiscriminate havoc, and occasionally, just retribution for perceived slights. This is one of the subtle characteristics that separates effective Pure Evil Villains from ineffective ones. A magnificent bad guy can get kinda lame if their motivation is too complicated. I'll talk about this in more detail later. Another key factor here is that whatever the villain is doing, they really want to do it. They are having fun with their villainy. Their motivation is basically purely selfish. Whatever they're doing, it's 'cause they wanna do it, not because it needs doing for some greater purpose or whatever. Because of this, most Pure Evil Villains are, at heart, motivated by either desire or anger. Or both. They want something, or they wanna hurt someone, or, y'know, whatever. And while this might seem like a bad quality for ANY character to have, in practice, having dubious origins and completely selfish motivations means there's nothing standing in the way of the villain's behavior. They become this self-contained engine of destruction with no character weaknesses that might make them sympathetic or open to change. And this conveniently segues into another very important quality for these villains to have: Unwavering self-confidence. These villains know exactly who they are, what they want, and why they want it. They don't deal with any questions of motive or morality. They just... are. The combination of disconnected backstory, self-centered motivation, and pure undiluted ego makes the Pure Evil Villain what amounts to a self-contained juggernaut. They can't be influenced by pleas to their backstory or who they might have been in the past. Their motive can't be undercut with logic or persuasion because it's completely personal to them. And their confidence means they won't WANT to change. They're basically immune to character development, and that means there's nothing standing between the villain and having fun with their villainy. You'd never interrupt the Joker with morality or tragic backstory while he's planning his next great roller coaster themed death machine. Maleficent doesn't ponder the emotional and moral ramifications of turning into an an enormous f**k-you dragon. She just sprouts the wings and wrecks shop, because she enjoys doing it as much as we enjoy seeing it. But unwavering confidence and single-minded drive has one huge weakness. Since the character is totally inflexible, they have a tendency to break. The final unifying quality of Pure Evil Villains is the third-act breakdown, where the villain is, for the first time, confronted by something they're actually unprepared to deal with, usually a protagonist blindsiding them with something unexpected, and like all egos, their confidence crumbles at the first real sign of trouble. A Pure Evil Villain is in their element when they're in control of the situation, broadly, when they know exactly where they stand. But when the heroes actually surprise them and start winning somehow, the villain is forced to reconsider their position in relation to the good guys, and what that means about who they are. And Pure Evil Villains are not good at reconsidering, so instead, they crack. And this moment is almost always immensely satisfying to watch. See, Pure Evil Villains generally spend most of the story being broadly unflappable and usually unbearably smug about it, and as a result, they can be oddly fun to watch succeed, but also very satisfying to see finally fall apart. The audience has this odd double reaction where they're both relishing their continued success AND rooting for them to fail. Not many many characters get that effect, because one major advantage of Pure Evil Villains is that their charisma is... a little contagious. You don't exactly root for them to win (unless the heroes are REALLY insufferable), but you do like watching them show off. They're just having so much fun, or they radiate so much raw force of personality that you just think they're super cool. But because they're also self-centered dickheads wreaking havoc and hurting people for fun, we love to watch them fail. Especially if it's in the same moment where you finally see the heroes succeed. This breakdown is so critical because it finally shows the audience what this villain fears above all else. And most Pure Evil Villains aren't exactly prone to fear. They can get frustrated or upset when things don't go their way, but they only lose it when they don't know how to handle the situation. In the Batman Beyond movie, the Joker's villainous breakdown is brought on by Terry heckling him. For all his bravado, he can't handle being the punchline. Fire Lord Ozai has his breakdown when Aang enters the Avatar State and starts outclassing him in every possible way, showing that Ozai, world-conquering tyrant that he is, is completely incapable of being powerless, making his final defeat where his bending is taken away even more appropriate. In Transformers Prime, Megatron spends the whole show kind of hung up on Optimus Prime in this, uh... "soulmates-but-for-murder" kind of way? You know, the classic "only one allowed to defeat you" thing? Hell, at one point he even helps save Prime's life so he can kill him properly later on. So he freaks out (briefly), when in the grand finale of the show, his final showdown with Optimus is abruptly cut off by Bumblebee jumping out of nowhere and stabbing him in the back. I mean, he doesn't freak out for long, but it's definitely in there somewhere. This freakout is in part because it's just so wrong for anyone but Optimus to actually defeat him, and also because he's spent the entire show completely dismissing Bumblebee as no threat, and technically, killed him a couple minutes prior, so he's understandably surprised to see him up and about. And I've got a personal favorite example that applies to my favorite Pure Evil Villain: Megabyte from ReBoot. But to understand why his breakdown is so good, I need to contextualize a little. ReBoot started off as a light-hearted kids' show set inside a computer. The protagonist, Bob, was an antivirus program, and he had a tag-along fanboy sidekick named Enzo. The antagonist was a computer virus named Megabyte. The first two seasons of the show were pretty standard kids' show episodic fare, but at the end of Season Two, Megabyte sticks Bob in a pod and launches him out of the show, whereupon he proceeds to wreak unimpeded havoc throughout Season Three. At this point, only scrappy sidekick Enzo is around to actually fight back, but he's so comically underpowered compared to Bob and Megabyte that his efforts resemble Jimmy Olsen taking on General Zod. Enzo does manage to make some headway against him, but through sheer bad luck, he ends up getting stuck in a game, ejected from the system, and lost on the Net for the equivalent of ten years, during which time he grows up and goes from endearing but useless to insanely battle-hardened. He also abandons his "Enzo" identity entirely and starts going by "Matrix," just to drive home how much he's changed. When he ultimately returns to face Megabyte, Megabyte is initially surprised to see how jacked he is, but still only sees the helpless kid whose ass he kicked earlier. But this confidence shatters the minute Matrix punches him so hard, he goes flying into the opposite wall and gets up with a big fist-shaped dent in his shiny metal chest. Two and a half seasons of buildup with this completely unflappable villain who never even gets scratched up to this point, just to see him crap his pants and it is BEAUTIFUL. This is the impact a third-act breakdown can have. It's basically a huge signal to the audience that this is a game-changer, that the fictional status quo is in pieces and ANYTHING can happen now. Once the villain cracks, it signals that they can lose. I will not stop talking about how good the writing on this show was until it has gotten the viewership it deserves. I'll drop a link in the description so you can look it up on an official streaming site. E-except... Season Four. You don't... have to watch Season Four. By the way, sometimes Pure Evil Villains survive their third-act breakdown, and it actually forces them to character develop into not-Pure Evil Villains. Vegeta's character arc, for example, is basically just a string of third-act breakdowns that eventually force him to stop him to stop being such a dick all the time. So these are kind of the core qualities of a well-written Pure Evil Villain, but it's not the whole story. Because, see, Pure Evil Villains are really simple, and that means they can be REALLY BORING. No backstory, no character arc, a totally selfish motivation, there's really not much to work with there. And it's actually really hard to pin down what exactly separates a good villain from a bad one. One possibility is just acting quality. Most really good villains have really, REALLY good actors. But that can't be the only factor, since there's also plenty of terrible villains with good actors. Christopher Eccleston is a great actor, but Malekith from Thor: The Dark World is a terrible villain. But this is more the result of a systemic writing error that a lot of writers seem to struggle with these days: Half-assing a good villain by trying to give them depth with a complex motivation. When writers don't fully commit to pure evil, they're stuck with the worst traits of the ensuing compromise. See, I said Pure Evil Villains need simple, self-serving motivations because when you give a villain a complicated and/or unselfish motivation, you're making them nuanced in directions that detract from their villainy. And if your goal is to make a complicated villain, that's not a bad thing! Lots of antagonists are the heroes of their own story who think they're doing the right thing, and those antagonists need complicated motivations. But the Pure Evil Villain is self-aware and usually flamboyant in their villainy, and they DON'T think of themselves as the hero of their own story. How is a writer supposed to reconcile a villain with Maleficent-levels of villainous panache and Zuko-levels of sympathetic motivation? Marvel does this CONSTANTLY. Malekith, Ultron, and most recently, Thanos, all played by excellent actors, suffer from the "unselfish motivation" problem. Take a villain, give them gravitas, spruce up their visual design, let them monologue a little, they'll look and sound like a Pure Evil Villain, but if their character doesn't fit their motive, their impact is gonna suffer. I don't really want to tear into Thanos here, but he spends most of Infinity War being written like a complex villain rather than a pure evil one. A noble monster who doesn't want to wipe out half the universe, but feels he has to in order to save it. But then there's little moments that make no sense if that's what they're going for. If Thanos is a reluctant monster, why'd he kill Loki so tortuously or have such an obvious blast fighting the Hulk, and why did he kill all the dwarves of Nidavellir and mutilate Eitri? What part of that was "perfectly balanced," smart guy? Sometimes they write him as evil and loving it, and sometimes they write him as a tormented paragon, the tragic hero of his own story. But those characters don't fit together. Also, his whole plan was stupid and they should have stuck with the comics' motivation of "trying to bone the the thoroughly uninterested personification of death." Anyone who thinks THAT wouldn't make a scary villain has clearly never dealt with /r/incels. But Thanos is clearly intended to be a complex antagonist, and his little moments of pure evil come across as disruptively out of character rather than his real character shining through. Ultron is really the worst offender here. Thanos is at least kind of interesting, and they just totally forgot to give Malekith a personality, but Ultron has TONS of personality. Too much personality, if you ask me, since I like it when Ultron is terrifyingly inhuman instead of wisecracking with his CREEPY ROBOT TEETH. (Why does everyone keep giving robots teeth?) But the thing is, Ultron has tons of gravitas and personality. His backstory is irrelevant to his arc, his motive is simple, and his confidence is ironclad, but even though he feels like a great setup for a Pure Evil Villain, he doesn't feel like he wants to do his evil plan. His "kill all humans" thing just feels like a plot obligation. He's characterized with a very human personality. He clearly has affection for Wanda and Pietro, he expresses loneliness when he kidnaps Black Widow just so he has someone to talk to, and he holds personal grudges against the individual members of the Avengers. But his alleged motivation is the same over-logical motive they always give Ultron, which is that world peace is impossible as long as there are two humans on the planet at the same time. This motive doesn't fit this version of Ultron, and it shows in the movie. He never really feels invested in the plot. It feels more like he's the disgruntled evil minion with his own wacky agenda who's begrudgingly carrying out someone else's sinister plan, but it's HIS PLAN! Hell, even the writers forget what his true motivation is sometimes. Does he want another mass extinction or does he want to beat up the Avengers with a squillion metal dudes? This Ultron seems a lot more invested in punching Tony than he is in killing humanity, and there's nothing wrong with that, but since the writers don't want to fully invest either in "soulless robot Ultron logically wiping out the human race" or in "sassy James Spader Ultron wisecracking his way through world domination," we get a half-assed villain whose plans don't match his personality. Compare Ultron to the way Loki was written in the first Avengers movie. Smirking, snarking, monologuing, a huge mass of overconfidence and pure villainous panache. And in that movie, Loki WAS the evil minion carrying out someone else's plans, and he was still having more fun with it than Ultron was with his own evil plan. And as a side note, his third-act breakdown-- (or beatdown, in this case) is so hilarious to watch because it's being dealt to him by the ONLY character in the movie who could not care less what Loki is talking about. But Loki got more complicated and less pure evil as the movies went on. He didn't stay a Disney villain. Probably the most totally pure evil villain the Marvelverse has produced is Hela. She's got it all: unimportant backstory, ludicrous power, and a purely selfish motivation. She wants to rule Asgard, and as the goddess of death, it's not really a problem for her if she has to murder everyone in Asgard to do it. From her very first scene, Hela's fun, but because of the way the story is structured, she skirts the edge of being boring. Excellent acting, a lot of personality, and a really striking visual design help keep her from being too flat, but the big problem is, she doesn't really have that much to do. She spends the movie breaking Mjolnir, murdering her way to the throne, fighting Thor a couple of times and then exploding off screen. Not actually much going on there when half the movie takes place on the other side of the galaxy and the protagonists aren't even the ones that beat her. And this is actually, I think, the key factor in keeping a villain from being boring: You gotta give them stuff to do. They can't just be a big bowling pin for the heroes to knock over. Because a Pure Evil Villain is simple, but that doesn't mean they're not a character. They can still do stuff in the narrative beyond just furthering the plot. What are they planning, how do they handle successes or setbacks, who do they interact with and how, what do they do to entertain themselves in between acts of villainy? Now, one of the classic ways to flesh out a Pure Evil Villain is by giving them a more complicated villainous foil. While the Pure Evil Villain is basically a monolithic force of raw charisma, the foil can be a lot more complicated. Harley Quinn is a complex foil to the Joker, with themes of love, manipulation, madness, and even domestic abuse. And while it's only so interesting to watch the Joker run around, wreak havoc, and get punched by Batman, it's REALLY interesting to see how he interacts with Harley, and how he manipulates her through their twisted romance. Another classic is Starscream. Whereas boss Megatron is basically only invested in killing Optimus (and I guess also ending the war for Cybertron as a consequence), Starscream is motivated in a number of directions. He's conniving, power-hungry, and fundamentally cowardly. He's also hilarious, which is a big help. Starscream makes a good villain because he's very dangerous, but he's motivated by ambition and self-preservation. He wants to be powerful, but his veneer of confidence cracks at the slightest hint of danger. Just by existing in the show, he elevates Megatron. His own hilarious cowardice, frequent incompetence, and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder serve to highlight how completely unflappable and usually unstoppable Megatron is. Megatron is more cool because Starscream is so uncool. In contrast, consider Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine is about as pure evil as they come. Very simple backstory, very simple motivation, and honestly just sits around cackling to himself most of the time. He's loud, aggressive, and BORING. But Darth Vader is not boring. Darth Vader is awesome. Where the Emperor is a classic raving supervillain, Darth Vader is no talk, all action. But he's also a giant ball of self-loathing who practically jumps at the chance for redemption. He's calm and intimidating; the emperor is... honestly, neither of those things. But in the context of Star Wars, this doesn't kill the story because the main conflict IS between Luke and Darth Vader. The rebels might care more about taking out the Emperor, but all the character drama is based on Vader, so the burden of carrying the movie's villainy doesn't rest on Palpatine's uncharismatic shoulders. But the complex foil doesn't have to be a subordinate. Circling back to ReBoot because I'm very predictable, Megabyte's villain foil is his sister and fellow virus Hexadecimal, who is the Chaotic Neutral to his Lawful Evil. She's pretty much completely insane, especially after Season Two, and is actually significantly more dangerous than Megabyte. It takes him two and a half seasons to do any real damage, but Hexadecimal unleashes a bug that literally turns everything in the system to stone in Episode 4, and later gains full-on reality-warping powers when she taps into the system's Paint program. But the thing is, she basically only ever does stuff for the funsies, not as part of any overarching evil plan. And as an additional complication, she's kind of sweet on the main character, Bob, and sometimes gets motivated by that. Hex is scary 'cause she's absolutely bonkers, but on average, she's actually less of a threat because she never has a plan. Her mannerisms also contrast with Megabyte. While he's almost always threateningly composed, Hex swings wildly between sweet-voiced politeness and shrieking insanity. Where Megabyte is pure evil, Hex is pure chaos, which is a character archetype that has a lot in common with pure evil but moves in very different directions. Classy villains always feel classier when you have something to compare them to. The complex villain foil, like all character foils, highlights by contrasting. A Pure Evil Villain is very simple but will still have qualities that can be explored. And if you're worried about your villain being too flat or not having enough to do, pairing them with a foil who can help flesh out their character qualities will help make them interesting. Honestly... even with all this, there's no magic formula to make or break a pure evil character. There's no trick to writing a character whose sheer force of personality is flat-out fun to watch, and there's no formula to make Pure Evil Villains work and be not boring, which, ah, makes sense because formulaic writing is always boring. I guess what I was getting at is what I said in the beginning. People like to tell you that good villains are complicated and you HAVE to make them sympathetic or noble or whatever, but you don't! Sometimes you can just write pure evil and it can be really, really fun. Why do you think people keep writing sad thinkpieces about why we don't have proper Disney villains anymore? It's 'cause we miss the Ursulas and the Maleficents and the Jafars. They've got their place in fiction, and I'm kind of tired of people pretending like they don't. So... yeah. Before we go, thanks again to our friends at WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video. If you're here on our channel because you're interested in storytelling, then I've got good news. WorldAnvil is a browser-based worldbuilding software that you can use for anything from a novel to a D&D campaign. From wiki databases on people, places, and events to story timelines and even interactive maps, WorldAnvil makes it easy to keep track of every single detail you can think up. And on top of that, it lets you share your world with anyone from your readers to your D&D party. WorldAnvil works with any genre and story medium, and it comes with over 25 custom worldbuilding templates to work with, plus lore prompts to help get you thinking. And here's the best part! 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I love trope talks. ♥
As for quality #5, the third-act breakdown where the pure evil character finally cracks, crashes, and burns... hmm. Sure, good should triumph over evil (except for when it shouldn't) blah blah blah, but I've always really liked the idea of a pure evil character that also doesn't panic. They don't get what they want, but they don't break either. As their plans crumble before their eyes, even if they're moments from death, they welcome it with a wicked grin. Or perhaps they simply smirk; maybe they guffaw with gusto! They could also just blankly accept their defeat and move on (or be killed), but they never crack.
Red mentions how their "villainous charisma means you like to see them succeed, but their evilness means you like to see them crash and burn", but when the evil character shows no fear at their end, it's almost as if they do succeed even though they've failed. I like that idea. ^_^
And of course, having just spent far too long saying all that, I can't think of any examples, haa.. anyone know of anything like that?