Are warm and fuzzy villains a good idea?
So, how do like your villains? That is, how evil (or not evil) should they be to make for a good story? Do you prefer vast impersonal forces of doom (like the distant, unutterably alien forces in HP Lovecraft)? Or do you like your villains to be flawed, misguided creatures who have at least the potential for some kind of redemption, even if they never get there (Gollum in Tolkien, and maybe now Snape in HP)?
Maybe this is a question that only comes up in fantasy, science fiction, and supernaturally-based horror. In everything else, your villains are human, and there are no malign supernatural influences to make them stop being human. In fantasy and sf this won't necessarily be the case. In these stories we can imagine humans confronting beings totally unlike ourselves. Cybernetic beings with no individuality, like the Borg in Star Trek, or the Daleks in Doctor Who. Supernatural forces that are by nature malign and have nothing in common with humans, like demons. Creatures that see humans as their natural prey, like the Wraith in SGA.
And that's cool, in a way, though there are a lot of people who don't appreciate that and who therefore don't like science fiction and fantasy. One argument against fantasy as a genre is that it allows us (hostile critics say) to indulge in sloppy moral thinking. If you start thinking about other human beings as purely villainous, the argument goes, you're oversimplifying other people, treating them like things. If you demonize other people you're more likely to make bad ethical decisions. Thinking about vast uncaring forces doesn't help you deal with ordinary living, where most of the conflicts we face have to do with people who have problems rather like our own.
So, okay, yes -- but fantasy and sf, when they go into their Vast Uncaring Forces mode, can help us consider the possibility that there may be stuff out there in the universe that really, truly, does not care about us at all. Are human values the same thing as the universe's values? Are human beings, erm, a good idea? From whose vantage point?
Vast impersonal villains can help us think about that kind of dizzying question. It's kind of funny, then, that fantasy and sf use them so rarely -- and when they do, the stories often undergo a process of reverse demonization -- of humanization. I've come to call this process the Borg Progression, after the Star Trek villains of the same name. Every single villain I named in the list above has undergone some form of the Borg Progression.
In the Borg Progression, even the scariest of villains slowly becomes warm and fuzzy, and I'm wondering whether that is or isn't a good idea. The Borg first appeared as an uncompromising cybernetic collective. Yay! The Federation had to fight with something with whom negotiation was impossible, because the Borg? They didn't care, in the human sense of caring. Their values were absolutely opposed to our own. But lo and behold, the Borg changed as the series progressed. They became more human, in that we got to see them as individuals. We had a Borg Child with whom we could feel sympathetic, and eventually a Borg Queen who could engage in sexy posturing, and engage, too, in that classic of the human villain repertoire: taunting.
I'm sorry, but real Borg (or demons, or Wraith) don't taunt. They don't CARE enough to taunt. And their indifference isn't the result of seeing humans as too far beneath them to be taunt-worthy. They don't taunt because it simply would never occur to them to taunt. They're just that different from us. Humans will taunt anything if sufficiently provoked. I have taunted tomato sauce stains on my favorite shirt, shortly before applying to them the Bleach of Doom. Ha, ha, victory over the thing that has dared to oppose me!
And yes, that is petty and pathetic (and also premature, because the bleach didn't work), but it's also human. Like other humans, I get emotionally invested in situations of conflict. That emotional investment can be a bad thing (e.g., every internet flame war you have ever witnessed.) But it can also be a good thing, because it means that we're open to emotional appeals to call the conflict off. If I heard a little voice coming from the spaghetti sauce saying "Please don't kill us OMG!" then I'd probably declare (if I survived my initial heart attack) that, in the immortal words of Doctor Seuss, "a person's a person, no matter how small."
So, that's human behavior (possibly on the strange end of the human continuum, but what the hey). The Borg as originally conceived would never say or even think of saying "A person's a person, no matter how small." The humanized Borg of later in the series? They might consider it. I can imagine Seven of Nine saying it (say, at the end of an episode, after Janeway has taught her lesson 5,478 in "what it means to be human").
All that is very worth-while, no doubt, but where are the Borg of yesteryear? Where is the absolute, uncompromising difference between human beings and a universe that does not care? Why do we eventually get an Emo Dalek (Doctor Who, a Rose episode), a Wraith Child (SGA), a Human/Wraith prison bonding episode (SGA), demons with love lives and political differences (Supernatural)?
I suspect that part of the driving force behind the Borg Progression is the need for plot devices and character development in an ongoing series. There's potential for different kinds of conflict if we imagine a villain capable of human emotion. Take that inevitable moment in the Borg Progression, the Child Character. A Child Borg creates, as a cold, uncaring villain cannot, an opportunity for psychological conflict within the series regulars. Should they treat the child as a child? Should they treat it as a Borg/Wraith/demon whatever? Should they sympathize with it? Not?
It's tempting to say that this potential for psychological conflict is a sign that stories with humanized villains are more sophisticated than stories with impersonal villains. But I stand by my belief that impersonal villains might have their uses too. They might be a way of confronting terrifying questions about what the universe is like outside our warm bubble of air and light on this tiny little planet. Impersonal fantasy villains raise not just ethical questions, but metaphysical ones. Here in the bubble, it is, yes, an ethically bad idea to think of a person as an Other. Outside the bubble? What's out there? If we try to personalize everything alien to ourselves, make it always and forever just like us, are we missing something?
Maybe this is a question that only comes up in fantasy, science fiction, and supernaturally-based horror. In everything else, your villains are human, and there are no malign supernatural influences to make them stop being human. In fantasy and sf this won't necessarily be the case. In these stories we can imagine humans confronting beings totally unlike ourselves. Cybernetic beings with no individuality, like the Borg in Star Trek, or the Daleks in Doctor Who. Supernatural forces that are by nature malign and have nothing in common with humans, like demons. Creatures that see humans as their natural prey, like the Wraith in SGA.
And that's cool, in a way, though there are a lot of people who don't appreciate that and who therefore don't like science fiction and fantasy. One argument against fantasy as a genre is that it allows us (hostile critics say) to indulge in sloppy moral thinking. If you start thinking about other human beings as purely villainous, the argument goes, you're oversimplifying other people, treating them like things. If you demonize other people you're more likely to make bad ethical decisions. Thinking about vast uncaring forces doesn't help you deal with ordinary living, where most of the conflicts we face have to do with people who have problems rather like our own.
So, okay, yes -- but fantasy and sf, when they go into their Vast Uncaring Forces mode, can help us consider the possibility that there may be stuff out there in the universe that really, truly, does not care about us at all. Are human values the same thing as the universe's values? Are human beings, erm, a good idea? From whose vantage point?
Vast impersonal villains can help us think about that kind of dizzying question. It's kind of funny, then, that fantasy and sf use them so rarely -- and when they do, the stories often undergo a process of reverse demonization -- of humanization. I've come to call this process the Borg Progression, after the Star Trek villains of the same name. Every single villain I named in the list above has undergone some form of the Borg Progression.
In the Borg Progression, even the scariest of villains slowly becomes warm and fuzzy, and I'm wondering whether that is or isn't a good idea. The Borg first appeared as an uncompromising cybernetic collective. Yay! The Federation had to fight with something with whom negotiation was impossible, because the Borg? They didn't care, in the human sense of caring. Their values were absolutely opposed to our own. But lo and behold, the Borg changed as the series progressed. They became more human, in that we got to see them as individuals. We had a Borg Child with whom we could feel sympathetic, and eventually a Borg Queen who could engage in sexy posturing, and engage, too, in that classic of the human villain repertoire: taunting.
I'm sorry, but real Borg (or demons, or Wraith) don't taunt. They don't CARE enough to taunt. And their indifference isn't the result of seeing humans as too far beneath them to be taunt-worthy. They don't taunt because it simply would never occur to them to taunt. They're just that different from us. Humans will taunt anything if sufficiently provoked. I have taunted tomato sauce stains on my favorite shirt, shortly before applying to them the Bleach of Doom. Ha, ha, victory over the thing that has dared to oppose me!
And yes, that is petty and pathetic (and also premature, because the bleach didn't work), but it's also human. Like other humans, I get emotionally invested in situations of conflict. That emotional investment can be a bad thing (e.g., every internet flame war you have ever witnessed.) But it can also be a good thing, because it means that we're open to emotional appeals to call the conflict off. If I heard a little voice coming from the spaghetti sauce saying "Please don't kill us OMG!" then I'd probably declare (if I survived my initial heart attack) that, in the immortal words of Doctor Seuss, "a person's a person, no matter how small."
So, that's human behavior (possibly on the strange end of the human continuum, but what the hey). The Borg as originally conceived would never say or even think of saying "A person's a person, no matter how small." The humanized Borg of later in the series? They might consider it. I can imagine Seven of Nine saying it (say, at the end of an episode, after Janeway has taught her lesson 5,478 in "what it means to be human").
All that is very worth-while, no doubt, but where are the Borg of yesteryear? Where is the absolute, uncompromising difference between human beings and a universe that does not care? Why do we eventually get an Emo Dalek (Doctor Who, a Rose episode), a Wraith Child (SGA), a Human/Wraith prison bonding episode (SGA), demons with love lives and political differences (Supernatural)?
I suspect that part of the driving force behind the Borg Progression is the need for plot devices and character development in an ongoing series. There's potential for different kinds of conflict if we imagine a villain capable of human emotion. Take that inevitable moment in the Borg Progression, the Child Character. A Child Borg creates, as a cold, uncaring villain cannot, an opportunity for psychological conflict within the series regulars. Should they treat the child as a child? Should they treat it as a Borg/Wraith/demon whatever? Should they sympathize with it? Not?
It's tempting to say that this potential for psychological conflict is a sign that stories with humanized villains are more sophisticated than stories with impersonal villains. But I stand by my belief that impersonal villains might have their uses too. They might be a way of confronting terrifying questions about what the universe is like outside our warm bubble of air and light on this tiny little planet. Impersonal fantasy villains raise not just ethical questions, but metaphysical ones. Here in the bubble, it is, yes, an ethically bad idea to think of a person as an Other. Outside the bubble? What's out there? If we try to personalize everything alien to ourselves, make it always and forever just like us, are we missing something?