Am I the only one sick of the 'villain with tragic backstory' shtick?

'Evil' to me, is a ridiculous word. To the very cells within us, nature is at constant war, with things killing and eating each other like crazy. Just because we have sophisticated language with which to comprehend our actions, does not mean we are not still slaves to instinct and environmental influence. Sometimes the development of our brains is faulty, due to nature, and that can lead to an absence of the tribal altruism we developed in order to live in harmonious communities, or sometimes we can deviate due to extreme sexual urge or abuse.
Just because we as animals can be cruel, doesn't mean there's anything more evil about that cruelty than when a mistreated dog or a mentally ill ape kills. The OP was about giving villains back story and that's what I was responding to, because in my eyes people are animals, not higher beings with seeds of evil or good in them, merely responsive organisms.
If this opinion isn't helpful to you, then please ignore it. Like I said, I'd rather not debate.

 

THIS might explain it better than I can.

 

For me, a lot of it ties back to my Utilitarian beliefs. I think it's wrong to hurt people unless you have to do so for some greater good, even if those people have hurt others in the past. People feel a lot more justified about fictional characters hurting other fictional characters when they can cram the victim into a "monster" category--and more to the point, people feel a lot more justified hurting real people they can cram into a "monster" category. Motivations and backstories make it easier for me to get away with having my heroes not hurt my villains any more than my villains have already hurt themselves.

Speaking of which, I'm also fond of Twilight Zone-style endings where the villain's suffering is a direct result of their own actions. A psychic inadvertently destroys lives with fake past-life regressions, so the one person he actually cares about comes to despise him and leaves him alone and empty. A serial killer faces and defeats the ghosts of everyone she killed, then is killed by the ghost of the person she used to be before she ground down her conscience. Not all these characters have tragic backstories, but they have or had something close enough to a sympathetic side that their punishment has meaning to them.

Finally, I'm just not judgmental enough to hate some of the ideologies I portray. Many of them are inspired by real beliefs that aren't exclusively held by evil people, translated into a context where they become a dangerous obstacle for the hero. They're not always relatable in that specific context, but some readers may agree more closely with the ideas they express than the ideas of the hero, and I myself don't always disagree with everything they say. (After all, us Utilitarians are painfully popular as villains, sometimes in ways I find offensive.)

Of course, this doesn't apply at all to my more Lovecraftian villains. Sometimes I want to deal with a more abstract idea as an enemy rather than a living, breathing character.

 

Speaking from the standpoint of a fellow-writer, the reason I dislike 'evil' in stories is because it really can become a simplistic cliché. Whenever I see a writer using the word 'evil' or 'villain' to describe a character or potential character in one of their stories, I immediately drop off the branch. Surely, if you understand your character as fully as you should, then you'll know there isn't such a thing as pure 'evil' or a dastardly villain. There are always degrees to explore, and repercussions to consider.

For example, how many people out there doing 'good' are actually creating problems? I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, after I threw a few piles of leftover unshelled Christmas nuts outdoors for the local squirrels. (They saw me do it.) Here's me, Lady Bountiful, saving the wee critters from a few days of cold, wet, hungry searching for food. Right? But now they're ganging up on the house, spending hours waiting outside the door for more, chewing holes in our wheelie bins, and climbing onto the window sills and peering in, demanding attention and more food. So what kind of mess did my 'good intentions' create? The last thing I want is for wildlife to become dependent on me. Sharing my bounty is one thing, but assuming responsibility for the rest of their lives? Not so 'good' is it. So ...I grit my teeth and refuse to feed any more. And this probably makes me a sadistic evil bitch, in the eyes of these squirrels.

Life is never really black and white.

 

We need to separate some pretty suspect writing (even by video game terms) from the wider literary device. A huge problem (from a writing standpoint) with Fallout 4 is that they tried to make every single side be 'the good guy' who you might naively sign up with just because you're trying to play the good guy. And in that circumstance, yeah this is a horrible narrative device. Trying to make everyone the good guy is the problem, not making villains sympathetic.

In other games with more complex (and frankly just better writing) like say the first Deus Ex you see a rather different approach being taken - Instead of trying to make everyone 'good but misunderstood' they make everyone 'bad but with good motives' and those motives are explored and interesting and you are asked in essence to choose the lesser of three evils. Now that's always going to be an interesting decision making process. You know that nothing is perfect, that even if you feel strongly for one faction people will die and you will have killed them. It's a game where just stopping playing and refusing to make a choice is a legitimate game play answer.

The difference here is night and day.

Making everyone a good guy ensures that the writing will be shallow. If everyone is good and doing good things for good reasons there's nothing to explore. There's no hard decisions, there's no pain or growth. Even when good guys are in opposition it's extremely facile story telling. It's boring, frankly. By contrast when no-one is really good and even the apparent good guys have agendas and do bad things to further good aims there's a huge slew of stuff to explore and deconstruct.

I agree that some writers do go a bit overboard. A good villain is one whose motives we understand but whose aims we can't agree with. Dr Doom is my go-to example of this. He firmly believes the whole world would be better run by him. His genius and his authority would ensure a better world. As readers we clearly don't like that. That's a monstrous idea! But we can understand why he keeps trying in the face of failure and why he can't be reasoned with in his own terms. That's a good villain.

The problems come when writers over do it. Perhaps they are going for a whole 'we aren't so different' thing or maybe they just think a sympathetic villain is better, but I think the root cause is something else. I think it comes from writers who are trying to write a more complex villain but lack the imagination or life experience to really understand how a good person might do something faintly monstrous. I think, to a certain kind of writer, to be evil you must be damaged in some way. They don't really empathize with what might make someone do terrible things, so they just (understandably) imagine that it must simply be because of some tragedy or trauma in your past and that this is what makes you grow up evil. Essentially, they forget about the banality of evil. They try to explain someone's evils by what they are not who they are.

And the end result is, well, it's why it's easy to get bored of. The explanation makes us feel sorry for the bad guy, because it would have to. It's trauma. Of course we feel sorry. And using those past things as an explanation says tacitly that the character really couldn't help it. After those events all this was set in stone. And if he has no free will then he never chose to be bad, ergo he's not actually bad and thus we have a character who we feel sorry for, who isn't responsible for anything bad, who probably takes a fall at the end and, well, yeah we sympathize with him. To do better you need to make a jump to another level and ask why they chose to do bad things. That's how you can explore what drives a villain without making them into a tragic figure or even an anti-hero. You remind the reader that they decided one day to start mowing down pedestrians.

Honestly, if you are writing a story where you'd directly call someone a villain then you'd be better served sticking to the broader strokes. If that's the purpose they serve in the story then just let them be that. Sure, make them a real person, but getting into this 'He's a villain but...' kind of area is, in this writers opinion, very much just trying to be edgy for edginess' sake. Comic books have had this down for decades. Magneto can be sympathetic for sure but he's unashamedly a villain and we don't need to ask anything more. We can all relate when he says 'normal people only fear us because we're better than them...' but we absolutely aren't on board when he says '...so I should be allowed to kill them'. We see the motivation, we understand, but he doesn't have pathos. He's a murderer. He deserves to lose.

That's where you need to be with writing a more complex villain. If they chose to be bad then they deserve what they get. If their tragic past made all this inevitable then they don't because they never had a choice.

It's fine to have black and white in books, to have good and evil. Sometimes that just serves the story best. But if that's how you're writing then you have to make sure your bad guy is genuinely evil. If not, then, since the world is black and white and he's not 'black', then the only thing he can be is white.

 

Good point, and to the squirrels they don't see you as an evil bitch. Rather, they see you as a dependent, someone they know will provide food for them. My understanding is that this is kind of the last thing we ought to do for wild critters; condition them to rely on us for survival. They kind of know how to survive on their own for the most part.

But I love this example, mind if I use it for this post?

Let's say you've got a plot set in...I dunno, Canada. The plot revolves around a family who keeps feeding a doe and her fawn by leaving food and water out and it's gotten to the point where the doe and fawn now spend more time with the family in a suburban setting rather than out in the wild.

Then comes the wildlife rescue and they have to teach the family why this was not a good idea and now they must reintegrate the doe and fawn back to their natural habitat.

The ‘antagonist’ doesn't always have to be this morally corrupt bad guy who hurts innocents, nor does the ‘antagonist’ have to be someone with a sob story. Sometimes the person doing the incorrect action (feeding the doe and fawn) are just trying to do the right thing, but not realizing that they're actually hurting someone/something in the process.

Beautiful example, love this post.

Another excellent post! Crafting villains look to be much more difficult than I had previously imagined. It's easier to create heroes because they appeal to what we want and desire in the world. Villains? Not so much for the reasons you've listed out.

As for Fallout 4, the only villain I could really buy was Elder Maxon of the Brotherhood of Steel. I don't want to post too much because spoilers, but I liked him better because he felt a bit more fleshed out than the other would-be bad guys of the game's factions. His intentions are understandable (protect humans from what he sees is the second Armageddon Coming), but his methods are very questionable borderline/if not overly-extreme (ie, kill all non-humans regardless if they're hostile or not.) In a certain quest, he goes on a rant where he lists exactly why he's fighting, and why he feels he's in the right despite you and a certain someone telling him why he's wrong. At the same time, if you play your cards right, he's willing to back down just a tad from his own beliefs despite the fact that his own instincts are probably screaming at him to push you aside and just do what he had ordered you to do in the first place.

 

It's complimentary to the protagonist i.e. the whole "If you'd chosen one thing differently, then you'd be just like him!" It makes them seem more benevolent, in having veered near the boundary of evil, but yet pulled back and flourished on the good side. I'm not insinuating you needed explaining, or haven't already grasped this; I'm simply highlighting that this has a lot of appeal, and hasn't gotten stale. With that, we can expect its use for some time to come.

 

That's exactly what is says and that's not a bad thing, just it gets used in way more stories than it fits with. It should be like that in dark, grey-morality stories where the good guy is pretty dark too. But it's not. Often it gets used in much more happy stories where the good guy is more traditionally 'good' and the result is just horrible. The suggestion that there's a very literal cross roads between absolute good and absolute evil is bad enough, but add to that that the villain apparently knowingly chose absolute evil and you end up wondering if these guy are actually alike at all.

 

If I'm interpreting this right, then I agree; unless the protag is at least somewhat conflicted, then it isn't as appealing to have a 'grey villain'. Moral and/or situation parallels often make the best hero/villain dynamics.

 

I love antagonists that are good to the point of becoming the "evil" they hate.

Take for instance Javert from Les Mis. He isn't technically doing anything wrong, in fact he is doing his job. But his strict adherence to principles makes him question why he is even doing this. Eventually it is his undoing.

The same with the Jedi Council in most Star Wars, EU, games, and movies. They take non interference to the point of destruction, or assume stuff about their own Jedi that are not true.

 

Mills? Personally, I prefer Kantian morality.

I really have to disagree with these sentiments because they are terrible arguments. How do you define evil and good? Is evil just profound malevolence and immorality?

The reason I ask - when a parent punishes their child by beating them is that evil? What if they enjoy the act of beating them? If the intention is to correct their behavior is it okay? Also, does this suddenly make it righteous or good to kill a child to prevent them from being backed as the successor to a royal line? (The execution of the Romanov family anyone? Alexei was 13 at the time.)

I also disagree that only "good" characters make things boring. Conflicts between well-meaning people do not make them bad or evil - it is natural. Two well-intentioned people vying for something is dramatic enough. What about even boxing match which lead the story of Rocky? Do you say that such fictional or real-life examples are shallow, without growth or pain?

And yes, I use the term 'evil' very sparingly in writing, but with the right lens it becomes clear that a certain response can indeed be very evil.

 

One of my villains (the Great Awakening-inspired villain I mentioned in another thread) tortured a child to death for kissing her son. She murders a prostitute, tortures her own followers, and spreads a doctrine of shame and suffering that punishes women for having sexual desires. There are things she's done that she's remorseful for, but she fundamentally misunderstands how to atone, seeking to become ever more rigid and fanatical.

I don't consider this character evil.

Already I feel the urge to walk that back. She literally went to Hell for her actions, the centralmost main character despises her and thinks she can never be redeemed, her most faithful follower turns against her and lets her be destroyed . . . But honestly, I don't think I need to. Readers who feel that this villain is evil can and do fill that in without my specifically prompting them to*. All I have to do is write a story that's interesting whether or not they consider the villain evil.

*Amusingly, my beta reader got through the murder and torture and still partially sympathized with her, but lost all respect for her when she starting saying things that were sexist against men. I guess everyone has standards.

(On a side note, this is why I dislike most stories that are specifically aimed at making the reader ask "Is this protagonist evil?" Most of them become boring or unsatisfying to read if the reader answers "Yes, this protagonist is evil.")

 

So much of the modern world treats issues like this xD.

 

Here's my basic opinion on tragic backstories and antagonist sympathy. There are many ways to make antagonist sympathetic. I think you can make antagonist at least slightly sympathetic even when they're supposed to be very hated. For example; their motivations might be awful but they can be so likeable you sympathize anyway. The charming psychopath or some variation thereof. I prefer to make my antagonists significantly sympathetic, because I like complex characters and complex morality. I believe there can be good and bad without the stronger judgement of good and evil. And that applies to stories. You can have an antagonist without making them a "muahaha, i'm so evil" kind of antagonist. A tragic backstory is often good for producing this. And as a consequence, I vastly prefer an overabundance of tragic backstories, if this is true, than to have an overabundance of 2d antagonists. And I prefer not to use "villain" for the same reasons as "evil".

 

Yeah, pretty much. If you want to draw parallels between good and bad then they need to meet in the middle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm totally down with showing each side as sides of the same coin; it's just that if you want to do something more complex and interesting you need to write something more complex and interesting and a sob story alone doesn't do that.