Villains make stories exciting. They add an element of danger, giving the hero an adversary to overcome and the reader someone to hate. But who exactly counts as a villain? Is it any character who does bad things? This question came up in my mind when discussing the question of whether the opera Carmen has a villain. Is it Don Jose? He murders the protagonist. Is it Carmen? She leaves a trail of ruin, but that’s not her intention. Here I’ll put a few thoughts together.
First try: A proper villain does bad things with bad intentions. But do the intentions have to be bad? The classic example of the righteous villain is Javert in Les Miserables. Throughout the novel, he pursues Jean Valjean in the belief that he’s hunting down a dangerous criminal. He can’t grasp that Valjean has greatly changed, and when the truth hits him … well, that’s a spoiler. Is he a villain? Gottesmann in my The Magic Battery is similar, and I had Javert in mind when I created him. He thinks that letting just anybody use magic is too dangerous to allow, and he won’t allow the conviction of an innocent person, but his campaign kills a lot of people.
A better statement would be that a villain pursues bad goals with a clear purpose, possibly one that’s good in his or her eyes. The author has to portray the goals as bad. A reader might disagree and not consider the character villainous, but the author’s valuation is what counts. By this criterion, Carmen has no true villain. Carmen is a free spirit, callous toward the men she manipulates, but she doesn’t understand the effects of her fickle affections. Don Jose is weak, and Carmen draws him into steadily worse actions: first freeing a prisoner in his charge, then deserting, and finally killing her. Both characters are contemptible, but neither properly fills the villain’s role.
The most interesting villains have a plausible motive. Sauron started out just wanting a more orderly, organized world. Don Juan is a hedonist and doesn’t care whom he hurts. (Is Carmen basically a female Don Juan?) Pizarro is less interesting, as we don’t know why he started imprisoning people without cause. By the time he locked up Florestan, he was trying to cover up his earlier misdeeds. The Evil Overlords of space opera mostly want power for its own sake. Real-life tyrants are often like that, but learning something about their philosophy of power makes them more than just obstacles to overcome.
Two common motives are monetary gain and service to an enemy government. They’re both plausible, but they’re so overused that they become stereotypes unless the mix includes something distinctive. Adding details such as explaining why the villain is so committed to the Fatherland helps to make the character distinctive.
The opposite approach, keeping the villain mysterious and giving little detail, sometimes works. In Lord of the Rings, about all we learn about Sauron is that he’s powerful and wants more power. Tolkien devised a lot of background for him, but you have to read his other works to find it. This technique succeeds because Sauron is always offstage. He isn’t really a character in the story, just a threat to be defeated. If he were shown in person, he’d need more defining characteristics.
Some stories build to a revelation that the apparent villain is actually doing good. J. K. Rowling does this twice in the Harry Potter novels (naming names or books would be a spoiler). In Shel Silverstein’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” the singer’s father reveals that he gave the singer a girl’s name to force him to be strong.
But don’t let people who do bad things for flimsy excuses off the hook. Some say the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t evil because she was just upset about her sister’s death. But the sister had enslaved the Munchkins, and West apparently supported her. She forced Dorothy to serve her and denied her food if she wouldn’t obey. Somehow all the bloggers who say, “Oh, the poor witch, she was just rightfully angry about her sister’s death” never mention these points, probably because they never bothered to read the book.
The villain should be a worthy adversary, one who can be defeated only by an intelligent approach. See the Evil Overlord List for ways they shouldn’t make it easy for the hero.
Villains contribute more to a story when they have a purpose and a distinctive way of thinking. They can make a story not just a contest between opponents but a conflict between different ways of looking at the world.