Heroes and Villains

[Lucifer_Carroll]

The old literary device of definable heroes and villains. All of us have seen it and most of us have written it at sometime or another. I was wondering how each of us handles the idea of the Hero or the Villain in a story. Do you make them paragons of their elements or strive to make each human to the point where they are nearly indistinguishable? Where in the spectrum to you tend to go? Do you base the heroic elements off your own morality and villains off what pisses you off or do you tend to create an entirely different morality from the one you hold? Or do you not even use morality, seeing the whole archtype as a limiting device? Do you reuse the heroic traits from one character to another or do you change them slightly between characters based on their world and interactions and personalities? Are their elements that will always be constant in either your heroes or villains, some actions they cannot take and still be of that element in your story? Do you oft combine the hero and villain into one character and make them their worst enemy?

How do you do it?


Myself, I, when doing a hero/villain story, notice that I base the hero morality vaguely on my own values or the values of people I respect but that they also radically shift between characters and their personalities (one character may show a complete pacifism and others might get their hands dirty), there are a few traits that are always in constant. My male heroes will always have some measure of chivalry and all my heroes and heroines recognize their sins and strive to overcome them. However my villains are all over the map from the Spectre style competent evil genius to the lecherous pig rapist, they oft have little to nothing in common besides the commission of acts that are recognizably evil. My position on the spectrum of archetype to human also varies. Sometimes my villains are over-the-top, other times they're heroes who snapped.

I wonder how each of you handle the idea in your writing, how you approach the problem.

 

[CharleyH]

too tired now, but this is intriguing mythology ... want to keep it bumped.

 

[Liar]

I'm probably too bloody politically correct for this world. My heroes and my villains are almost always just two sides of a fence, with difference in perspective that is almost, but only almost unbreachable. And I tend to give my heroes as many unflattering flaws as my villains gets redeeming ones. There is almost always a perfectly understandable motive behind the villains seemingly evil actions.

It can be things like a heartless Gordon Gecko type of corporate predator, who also is a loving and caring father of five with a wife dying from cancer. So when it comes down to the final showdown, the hero has to let him go, or he'll fuck up the villains innocent family. Or he doesn't, fuck up the family, and becomes a monster himself. Maybe not always that cliché-ish, but often with similar status play.

 

[elsol]

I prefer the anti-hero... much more fascinating to work in black, white, and gray than colors.

When I do deal with the hero-villain paradigm, I prefer relative morality.

Sincerely,
elSol

 

[Stella_Omega]

I prefer the anti-hero... much more fascinating to work in black, white, and gray than colors.

When I do deal with the hero-villain paradigm, I prefer relative morality.

Sincerely,
elSol

nicely put, same here.
Actually, i don't think I've ever done a heroe/villian story... hmm, interesting thought, since it's so common!

 

[rgraham666]

I can't really say I've yet written anything with a 'hero' or 'villain' per se.

I do have unsympathetic characters in a couple of my stories.

In The Orange Slip the main characters ex-wife and ex-husband aren't portrayed as sympathetic characters. And in Bill and Ruby a bully makes Ruby's life unhappy.

In all these cases, there's a blindness to these characters, they are all unable to consider the consequences of their actions on others. The only consideration is their own pleasure.

So I can't help but put my personal morality into my stories. Lack of empathy is where all evil begins and ends in my opinion.

 

[Weird Harold]

The old literary device of definable heroes and villains. All of us have seen it and most of us have written it at sometime or another. I was wondering how each of us handles the idea of the Hero or the Villain in a story. Do you make them paragons of their elements or strive to make each human to the point where they are nearly indistinguishable? Where in the spectrum to you tend to go?

I prefer the Protagonist/Antagonist terminology because every story needs some sort of conflict. I try not to write clear cut black and white heroes and villians and stick to conflicting goals between average people.

Most of my protagonists tend to be decent people who care about others and the antagonists tend to be selfish or narrow-minded people who don't care about others or try to control others.

But like most of these questions, the answer is that it depends on the needs of the story -- some stories just need nasty, evil, villians and others need "villians" that are just misunderstandings or conflicts of interest between normal people.

Most of my "villians" are just people who are "doing their job" as best they can -- parents or friends that don't think a new love interest is "good enough" and try to protect the protagonist from making a mistake, or a current relationship that is getting in the way of "true love." Those are sufficient "villians" for most of what I write.

 

[neonlyte]

C.P. Snow's - The New Men, if you can find it, offers exemplary portrail of Heroes and Villains. It is somewhat staid in language, written in 1950's but loses none of the drama for that, and is surprisingly if subtly sexual between the lines.

The plot deals with the development of the atomic bomb during the years of the WW2, Snow particular well placed to write this account, he was a civil servant in war time Britain dealing with these issues. If ever a story revolved around Heroes and Villains, this is it and he handles the conflicts simultaneously on many stages.

The book is part of a series 'Strangers and Brothers' (the title tells you where it's heading), almost Wagnerian in scale tackling the H & V's within and without. Recommended reading for anyone who has aspirations for writing story's in this vein.

 

[TheEarl]

My novel's bad guy started out life as a bit of a cardboard cutout and has slowly gained depth with each additional edit. I'm currently completely redrafting it and he's turning out to be not that bad a guy. He's a complete schizophrenic and has massive personality changes when he thinks he's crossed and what was missing in the first draft was the nice guy side of his character. He was just bastard-coated bastard with a bastard core before.

Now he's a really nice person, if a little intolerant and too much of a god-botherer. Then things start to go against him and you get to see why the bastard comes out and why his personality swings so dramatically. And in the process you get a look at one of the heroines, seeing her darker side and realising that maybe he does have something of a reason to hate her. That occurred without me even realising it.

If I can pull it off, I'll be much more proud of him than I was of the cardboard cutout.

The Earl

 

[Colleen Thomas]

As with almost everything else, it depends on the story. It depends greatly on what I need from the characters and what I want to say with the work. In Voices, my hero is very flawed and very human. His enemy could be him and he recognizes that just before the climactic battle. Not only that his enemy could be him, but in different circumstances, he could have liked him.

In Sword of Aviondore, my Hero is pretty close to the heroic ideal and my villian is basically purely bad. But, and it's a big but, the story isn't primarily concerned with that battle, the true conflict is within the hero.

In my space opera, the villians tend to be largely agents of the Terran Authority, which is basically a huge, unwieldly, plodding beauracracy. They aren't eveil, they don't ven work for an evil government, it's just monolithic in nature and tends to use a trip hammer to kill files. Or my villains are the Trog, denizens of the edge of Human exploration, now engaged in a vicious and long runing war with the authority.

I have been accused of portraying men in a bad light in all my works. I think the criticism is unfair. I do tend to appropriate the less desireable traits of the male stereotype, but as harold noted, stories need conflict to move them and the rotten boyfriend, husband, is a pretty standard fixture in Les Erotica. Bernie, my husband in Football widow isn't evil, he isn't even bad, he's just an obsessive sports fan and rather thoughtless.

In my upcoming novella, should I ever complete it, The hero is pretty badly flawed, but grows as the story progreses. The villains range from purely evil, to partly evil, to indifferent. Since it's a tranny story, I can say with some confidence, I write as many sympathetic male characters as I do unsympathetic ones.

You fit your hero/Villian to your story and it can't be formulamatic. If it is, then you will fail at any story where you aren't taking the typical formulamatic approach.

The good guys and the bad guys sometimes need to be as different as day and night, at other times, they need to be two sides of the same coin.

 

[Sabledrake]

I love writing the villains. They're so much more fun. Being a villain is an active role, while being a hero is a reactive one ... unless the villain acts, the hero's got nothing to do.

All my little friends wanted to be Disney princesses and I wanted to be Maleficent. Take that, combined with 20+ years of roleplaying (almost always as the GM), and it's no wonder I feel so much more at home with the antagonists. They're just more interesting to me, even fascinating.

-- Sabledrake

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I love writing the villains. They're so much more fun. Being a villain is an active role, while being a hero is a reactive one ... unless the villain acts, the hero's got nothing to do.

All my little friends wanted to be Disney princesses and I wanted to be Maleficent. Take that, combined with 20+ years of roleplaying (almost always as the GM), and it's no wonder I feel so much more at home with the antagonists. They're just more interesting to me, even fascinating.

-- Sabledrake

Maleficent rocks!

I know of no feminine villian in cinema who even holds a candle to her

 

[Boota]

I like to explain motivations in my villains, but I try not to make them sympathetic. I don't want my reader hating the good guy for kicking his ass. The villain has to have a reason for being the villain, and it doesn't even have to be a good one.

As far as morality, I think the reader determines the morality of heroes and villains. The only thing that makes it easier on a writer is that right and wrong are black and white issues. Gray areas are merely the justification people use for doing something they know is wrong, but that they want to do anyway. That doesn't mean that a reader won't relate to the characters usage of the "gray area", it just means that the hero has to be right on a deeper level, just as the villain has to be wrong on a deeper level.

That said, I have no compunction about throwing out all the rules and writing an unlikable hero. I'm not fond of rules. What I said above is just a method I have used to tell the story I want to tell. When it comes to writing heroes and villains there is no right or wrong. It's all gray area.