round table discussion: villains!

[sageness]

Several people seconded an off-handed mention of doing a post on writing villains -- and LOTS of us are doing either Due South Seekrit Santa and/or Yuletide this holiday season, so this is hopefully a very timely and relevant post. Feel free to pimp this far and wide because I'd love to get a good range of discussion going in the comments

Comments

Now with added Mounties!

[buzzylittleb]

Looking through my dS fic, I'm a little surprised by the lack of villains. The bulk are of the "their own worst enemy" school of plotting and are typically more involved with slash psychology than anything else.

So, that's mirrors covered (the whole self villaincy things) so what about smoke?
1) one haunted book that does things to Vecchio's life
2) completely unseen bird smuggler
3) a crate of herrings (Ray/Ray comedy deathfic, yes, quite)

All of those are "Enabling villains". They aren't important as themselves, the can't carry a plot on their own. They are excuses to dig into the character's Inner Lives.

So do I have any real villains?
1) The psychotic alternate Billy Tallent in Wind Them Up and Let Them Go just about counts
2) The BFP, otherwise known as Episodic Romance, a crazy 70000 word casefic. We have an arch manipulator using crazies to do his dirty work, namely screwing over a dead gangster for his money. Did I mention that said bad guy could see the Dead Gangster's ghost? Much as I love my crazy psycho villains (which might explain my affection for Dexter) it's really another ruse. The whole thing started not with "hey, let's write a casefic" but "let Ray K.. (tbc)

Re: Now with added Mounties!

[buzzylittleb]

find out things about himself" and was briefly "the boys discover subtext after realising they are in a television show" (an idea better left to frankly better writers) and so ended up somehow developing plot and somewhere along the line the arc changed to "RayK sees ghosts... and this lets him inside things and understand his feelings..." (Look Ma! No Spoilers!). My bad guy didn't come fully formed, it was very organic, but now I think he was not as scary as I wanted him to be...

Is it some function of the slash that villains become secondary characters enabling the slash plot? They become "obstacles to romance" rather than fully formed characters.

And yes, on Frankie, I'm going to be using him and the lack of solid characterisation is driving me buggy. I don't know how to handle him without going all pantomime.

Re: Now with added Mounties!

[buzzylittleb]

On the reading side, like I said, I like the creepy type of villain to the realistic guy trying to feed his kids kind. I just don't know why. Hmm... *goes to think*